ple, and though we all were anxious to know how the inside of
the new house looked, we did not go to the reception; only the socially
impossible, and the travelling men's wives at the Metropole, whom Mrs.
Markley had met when she was boarding during the week they moved,
gathered to hear the orchestra from Kansas City, to eat the Topeka
caterer's food, and to fall down on the newly-waxed floors of the
Markley mansion. But our professional instinct at the office told us
that the town was eager for news of that house, and we took three
columns to write up the reception. Our description of the place began
with the swimming pool in the cellar and ended with the ballroom in the
third story.

It took John Markley a long time to realise that the town was done with
him, for there was no uprising, no demonstration, just a gradual
loosening of his hold upon the community. In other years his neighbours
had urged him and expected him to serve on the school-board, of which he
had been chairman for a dozen years, but the spring that the big house
was opened Mrs. Julia Worthington was elected in his place. At the June
meeting of the Methodist Conference a new director was chosen to fill
John Markley's place on the college board, and when he cancelled his
annual subscription no one came to ask him to renew it. In the fall his
party selected a new ward committeeman, and though Markley had been
treasurer of the committee for a dozen years, his successor was named
from the Worthington bank, and they had the grace not to come to Markley
with the subscription-paper asking for money. It took some time for the
sense of the situation to penetrate John Markley's thick skin; whereupon
the fight began in earnest, and men around town said that John Markley
had knocked the lid off his barrel. He doubled his donation to the
county campaign fund; he crowded himself at the head of every
subscription-paper; and frequently he brought us communications to
print, offering to give as much money himself for the library, or the
Provident Association, or the Y. M. C. A., as the rest of the town would
subscribe combined. He mended church roofs under which he never had
sat; he bought church bells whose calls he never heeded; and paid the
greater part of the pipe-organ debts in two stone churches. Colonel
Morrison remarked in the office one day that John Markley was raising
the price of popular esteem so high that none but the rich could afford
it. "But," chuckle