on." as a prefix to the names of politicians. Everyone in
town used to laugh at us for referring to whippersnapper statesmen as
"Honourable"; because everyone in town knew that for the most part these
whippersnappers were entirely dishonourable. It was easy enough to stop
calling our enemies "Hon.," for they didn't dare to complain; but if we
dropped the title even from so mangy a man as Abner Handy, within a week
Charley Hedrick would happen into the office with twenty or thirty
dollars' worth of legal printing, and after doing us so important a
favour would pause before going out to say:

"Boys, what you fellows got against Ab Handy?" And the ensuing dialogue
would conclude from old Charley: "Well, I know--I know--but Ab likes it,
and it really isn't much, and I know he's a fool about it; I don't care
in my own case, but if you can do it I kind of wish you would. Ab's
funny that way; he's never given up. He's like the fellow old Browning
tells about who has 'august anticipations, of a dim splendour ever on
before,' and when you fellows quit calling him 'Hon.' it makes him
blue."

And old Charley would grow purple with a big, wheezy, asthmatic laugh,
and shake his great six-foot hulk and toddle out leaving us vanquished.
For though the whole town reviles Abner Handy, Charley Hedrick still
looks after him.

It was said for thirty years that Handy did old Charley's dirty work in
politics, but we knew many of the mean things that Handy did were
unjustly charged to Hedrick. People in a small community are apt to put
two and two together and make five. Much of the talk about the alliance
between Hedrick and Handy is, of course, down-right slander; every
lawyer who tries lawsuits for forty years in a country town is bound to
make enemies of small-minded people, many of whom occupy large places in
the community, and a small-minded man, believing that his enemy is a
villain, makes up his facts to suit his belief, and then peddles his
story. It is always just as well to discount the home stories on an old
lawyer ninety-five per cent. if they are bad; and seventy per cent. if
they are good--for he may have saved the fellow who is telling them from
the penitentiary. But Abner Handy was never enough of a lawyer to come
within this rule. Indeed they used to say that he was not admitted to
the bar, at all, but that when he came to town, in 1871, he erased his
dead brother's name on a law diploma and substituted his own. Still, he