in appeared at the door and wanted to know if their
father was elected. Sylvia took upon herself the task of assuring them
that he was not yet elected, but he certainly would be before many
hours. Then they went away sanguine and satisfied, and trying to keep
sleepy eyelids from closing. In the street the noise was increasing as
the crowd received facts, and the cheers were loud and various. But
those of the enemy predominated, and Harley thrilled more than once with
silent anger. A half-dozen men passed the house singing a song in
derision of Jimmy Grayson; some of the words came to them through the
window, and Sylvia flushed, but Mr. Grayson himself showed no sign that
he understood.

The telegrams now were arriving fast; there were two streams of boys,
one coming in at the door and the other going out, and Mr. Dexter, at
the table, settled to his work. For a while the chief sounds in the room
were the tearing of paper, the rustling of unfolded despatches, and the
dry voice of the chairman announcing results. These votes were all from
Eastern cities, where the polls closed early and the ballots could be
counted quickly. Over the West and the Far West darkness still brooded,
and the country districts everywhere were silent.

Yet Harley knew that throughout the United States the utmost activity
prevailed. To him the night was wonderful; in a day of perfect peace
nearly twenty million votes had been cast, and the most powerful ruler
in the world had been made by the free choice of the nation, just as
four years or eight years hence another ruler would be made in his place
by the same free choice, the old giving way to the new. Now to-night
they were trying to find out who this ruler was, and no one yet could
tell.

But the tale would be told in a few hours. Harley knew that over an area
of three million square miles, as large as the ancient civilized world,
men were at work counting, down to the last remote mountain hamlet, and
putting the result on the wires as they counted it. And ninety million
people waited, ready to abide by the result, whether it was their man or
the other. To him there was something extraordinary in this organized,
this peaceful but tremendous activity. To-night all the efforts of the
world's most energetic nation were bent upon a single point. In each
state the wires talked from every town and village to a common centre,
and each state in turn, through its metropolis, talked to the common
cent