on. A man past seventy, head of a great importing establishment,
he had shown interest in public affairs only within the decade, although
his very build, tall, erect, commanding, and his manner suavely
courteous and untouched by futile haste, seemed to have equipped him
with a natural bent for public life. Marrying late in life, he seemed
to have found his bent more tardily than did other men. But he had
invested wealth, influence, and wisdom in the future of men who, come
to power, were paying him with this grant of his desire. The news,
coming to him unofficially but authoritatively from Washington, set
him to cabling his wife and daughter in Paris and telegraphing his son
whose steamer was just docking in New York. The boy's answer, delayed
in transit and announcing that he was already on his way to Chicago,
came with the morning newspapers and hurried his father through their
contents in order that he might be on time to meet Peter at the station.

The newspapers, chronicling Thorold's appointment briefly, were heavy
with harbingering of the funeral procession of the boy who had fallen
a fortnight before in the American navy's attack upon Vera Cruz. The
relative values that editors placed upon the marine's death and his own
honoring nettled Thorold. Ambassadors to the Court of St. Jerome were
not chosen from Chicago every day, he reasoned, finding Isador Framberg
already the fly in the amber of his contentment. To change the current
of his thought he read over Peter's telegram, smiling at the exuberant
message of joy in which the boy had vaunted the family glory. The yellow
slip drove home to James Thorold the realization of how largely Peter's
young enthusiasm was responsible for the whetting of his father's desire
to take part in public affairs. For Peter's praise James Thorold would
have moved mountains; and Peter's praise had a way of following the man
on horseback. Thorold's eager anticipation of the boy's pride in him
sped his course through rosy mists of hope as his motor-car threaded
the bright drive and through the crowded Parkway toward the Rush Street
bridge.

A cloud drifted across the sky of his serenity, however, as a blockade
of traffic delayed his car in front of the old Adams homestead, rising
among lilacs that flooded half city square with fragrance. The old
house, famous beyond its own day for Judge Adams's friendship with
Abraham Lincoln and the history-making sessions that the little group
of I