e," he declared. "We require just
one thing--a candidate of prominence and backbone."

Graves reached past the paste-pot to capture a fugitive match.

"What do you say to me?"

"What do I say!" Unwinding his long legs from his chair rounds the
editor dealt his friend a clap between the shoulders which sent his
cigarette spinning to the floor. "I say you're a trump."

Sprague had not a little in common with the type in the political
cosmos which is contemptuously styled cloistered. Of New England
stock, like most of Tuscarora, he had been born of a later migration
than the pioneers', and was hence less tempered by New York influences
for good or ill. Begotten a generation earlier, he would have tended
transcendental pigs at Brook Farm. His earliest political
recollections were associated with heated quotations from Garrison and
Wendell Phillips, and the sharpest-etched memory of his childhood had
to do with a runaway slave harbored in his father's garret. As a man
he was given to printing Emersonian nuggets in the editorial columns of
the _Whig_, his favorite sentiment being, "Hitch your wagon to a star,"
whose practical application led him over highways which knew not
macadam. He now perceived nothing grotesque in Bernard Graves's
proposal, nor did it astonish him. From his office window he had
chanced to overlook the stormy meeting of the suitors, but he gave
Graves no hint.

"With any other candidate I can think of," he declared, "this movement
would merely signify the protest of a self-respecting minority; with
you, the author of the famous Samothrace ode,--gad! I think it augurs
victory by a handsome majority."

Graves colored.

"I had forgotten the ode," he confessed. "Couldn't we eliminate that
from the campaign?"

"Eliminate it! Why, boy, it's half your platform."

"Is it?" said the novice, drearily. "Oh, very well. I thought I
should like to run on the moral issue. Shelby is corrupt, and the
other party is certain to name some creature who would out-Shelby
Shelby if he got the chance. That seems to me issue enough for a third
candidate without dragging in my verses. I'm sick of them."

"Do you find your royalties a nuisance?"

"Don't be banal, Volney. You understand me. I don't want to be the
one-sided artist merely; I want to do things as well as write about
them, and I want the provinces separate."

Sprague laughed paternally.

"If I'm not to be banal, neither must you be im