ded on their individual
merits. I should advise you to go at once to Washington, and enlist the
influence of the British Ambassador to get you personal and private
interviews with the powers that be. Then plead your own case. One of two
things will happen. Either there will be much hemming and hawing, and
much virtuous and judicial weighing of your peculiar case, article by
article, or the President himself will decide one way or another
off-hand--he being what he is. For that reason I think it would be well
to approach him by degrees, let him digest it a bit. He may be delighted
that you have thrown over your titles and your brilliant and promising
career to become an American citizen, invite you to take the oath of
allegiance forthwith, and order the State Department to issue a
passport. On the other hand he may fly off at a tangent and be
righteously indignant that a man with the blood of the Otises and
Adamses in him, who had the good-fortune to be born on American soil,
hesitated a moment after reaching man's estate--more particularly that
he never gave the matter a thought. Nothing could be more problematical.
I wouldn't bet a twenty-dollar gold piece either way. But, I repeat, you
must go yourself. Otherwise the affair would hang on interminably.
Moreover, you must tell no one the object of your journey. Tom Colton
would pull every wire within his reach, and he is no mean rival, to
postpone your admission to citizenship, and so, I fancy, would others."

He shot a keen glance at Gwynne. "I think I know who your visitor was,
to-day, and what he came to Rosewater for. That speech of yours, and its
effect on the crowd, never escaped the attention of the party bosses,
and of course you are a marked man in this small community--to say
nothing of your intimacy with the reform set in town. The judge, who
started somewhere in this neighborhood as a poor boy, rose from various
minor situations to be the secretary of Colton's bank, saved his dimes
and studied law. So far so good; the average self-made American. The law
leads a good many of us into politics and it wasn't long leading him. He
was an invaluable party man, with that bluff honest exterior, that
superabundant magnetism, and that twinkling eye. The world always
associates a fine upright nature with a twinkling eye. I have one myself
and I believe that is the main reason why I have always been afraid to
do wrong. Well, our friend got the bench when he wanted it, and