ing, and
hands not so red that measured dry goods over rural counters for
insistent female customers fingered in some dismay what seemed an
inexplicable array of table furniture.

"It don't make any difference which fork you take," said the good-natured
owner of this palace of luxury, "only I shouldn't advise you to use one
for the soup you wouldn't get much of it--what? Yes, this house suits me
very well. It was built by old man Duncan, you know, and his daughter
married an Italian nobleman and lives in a castle. The State ought to buy
the house for a governor's mansion. It's a disgrace that our governor
should have to live in the Pelican Hotel, and especially in a room next
to that of the chief counsel of the Northeastern, with only a curtain and
a couple of folding doors between."

"That's right," declared an up-state member, the governor hadn't ought to
live next to Vane. But as to gettin' him a house like this--kind of
royal, ain't it? Couldn't do justice to it on fifteen hundred a year,
could he? Costs you a little mite more to live in it, don't it?"

"It costs me something," Mr. Crewe admitted modestly. "But then our
governors are all rich men, or they couldn't afford to pay the
Northeastern lobby campaign expenses. Not that I believe in a rich man
for governor, gentlemen. My contention is that the State should pay its
governors a sufficient salary to make them independent of the
Northeastern, a salary on which they can live as befits a chief
executive."

These sentiments, and others of a similar tenor, were usually received in
silence by his rural guests, but Mr. Crewe, being a broad-minded man of
human understanding, did not set down their lack of response to surliness
or suspicion of a motive, but rather to the innate caution of the hill
farmer; and doubtless, also, to a natural awe of the unwonted splendour
with which they were surrounded. In a brief time his kindly hospitality
became a byword in the capital, and fabulous accounts of it were carried
home at week ends to toiling wives and sons and daughters, to incredulous
citizens who sat on cracker boxes and found the Sunday papers stale and
unprofitable for weeks thereafter. The geraniums--the price of which Mr.
Crewe had forgotten to find out--were appraised at four figures, and the
conservatory became the hanging gardens of Babylon under glass; the
functionary in buff and green and silver buttons and his duties furnished
the subject for long and heate