hat everybody except himself was in bed and
asleep. The lights in all the houses were out, and there was no sound
whatever save that of the wind as it came in from the prairie and
stirred the new foliage of the trees. "And this is our wicked America,
for which my foreign friends used to offer me sincere condolences!"
murmured Harley.

But he returned quickly to his own mental disturbance. He felt as he
used to feel on the eve of a battle that all knew was coming off, there
on the other side of the world. He was then with an army which he was
not at all sure was in the right; but when he sat on a hill-top in the
night, looking at the flickering lights of the enemy ahead, and knowing
that the combat would be joined at dawn, he could not resist a feeling
of comradeship with that army to which, for a time--and in a sense,
perhaps, alien--he belonged. Those soldiers about him became friends,
and the enemy out there was an enemy for him, too. It was the same now
when he was to go on a long journey with Jimmy Grayson, who stood upon a
platform of which he had many doubts.

He turned back to the hotel, and when he entered the lobby a swarm of
men fell upon him and demanded the instant delivery of any news which
he might have and they had not. They were correspondents who had come by
every train that afternoon--Hobart, Churchill, Blaisdell, Lawson, and
others, making more than a score--some representing journals that would
support Grayson, and others journals that would call him names, many and
bad.

"We hear that you have been to dinner with the candidate," said
Churchill, the representative of the New York _Monitor_, a sneering
sheet owned by one foreigner and edited by another, which kept its eye
on Europe, and considered European opinion final, particularly in regard
to American affairs; "so you can tell us if it is true that he picks his
teeth at table with a fork."

"You are a good man for the _Monitor_, Churchill," said Harley, sharply.
"Your humor is in perfect accord with the high taste displayed, and you
show the same dignity and consideration in your references to political
opponents."

"Oh, I see," said Churchill, sneering just as he had been taught to
sneer by the _Monitor_. "He is the first guest to dine with the
Presidential nominee, and he is overpowered by the honor."

"You shut up, Churchill!" said Hobart, another of the correspondents.
"You sha'n't pick a quarrel with Harley, and you sha'n't be a
misch