er days he is old
Alphabetical Morrison, a man apart from us. We like him well enough, and
so long as he cares to be justice of the peace no one will object, for
that is his due. But, someway, there is no talk of making him County
Clerk; and there is a reason in everyone's mind why no party names him
to run for County Treasurer. He has been trying hard enough for ten
years to break through the crust of the common interests that he has so
long ignored. One sees him at public meetings--a rather wistful-looking,
chubby-faced old man--on the edge of the crowd, ready to be called out
for a speech. But no one calls his name; no one cares particularly what
old Alphabetical has to say. Long ago he said all that he can say to our
people.

The only thing that Alphabetical ever organised that paid was a family.
In the early days he managed to get a home clear of indebtedness and was
shrewd enough to keep it out of all of his transactions. Tow-headed
Morrisons filled the schoolhouse, and twenty years later there were so
many of his girls teaching school that the school-board had to make a
ruling limiting the number of teachers from one family in the city
school, in order to force the younger Morrison girls to go to the
country to teach. In these days the girls keep the house going and
Alphabetical is a notary public and a justice of the peace, which keeps
his office going in the little square board building at the end of the
street. But every day for the past ten years he has been coming to our
office for his bundle of old newspapers. These he reads carefully, and
sometimes what he reads inspires him to write something for our paper on
the future of the Queen City, though much oftener his articles are
retrospective. He is the president of the Old Settlers' Society, and
once or twice a year he brings in an obituary which he has written for
the family of some of the old-timers.

One would think that an idler would be a nuisance in a busy place, but,
on the contrary, we all like old Alphabetical around our office. For he
is an old man who has not grown sour. His smooth, fat face has not been
wrinkled by the vinegar of failure, and the noise that came from his
lusty lungs in the old days is subsiding. But he has never forgiven
General Durham, of the _Statesman_, for saying of a fight between
Alphabetical and another land agent back in the sixties that "those who
heard it pronounced it the most vocal engagement they had ever known."
T