u know he'd come charging up
to the Speaker's desk with a maximum freight-rate bill, or a stock-yards
bill--and where would I be? I tell you he won't stand hitched. He'll
swell up like a pizened pup, and you couldn't handle him. Where'd any of
us be, if the Representative from this county got to pawing the air for
reform? I know Jake as though I'd been through him with a lantern."
There must have been a discussion of some kind among the others, for a
lengthy interim followed; then the voice continued: "Elect him?--of
course we can elect him. I can get five hundred from the State Committee
and we can raise that much down here. This is a Republican year, and we
could elect Judas Iscariot against any of the eleven brethren this year
on the Republican ticket, and I tell you it's Ab. You fellows can do as
you please, but I'm going to run Ab."

Then, being full of political curiosity rather than impelled by a desire
for psychological research, the reporter slipped out and waited in a
stairway opposite the Exchange National Bank building until the light in
Hedrick's law office was extinguished. Then he saw old Charley and his
henchmen come out, one at a time, look cautiously up and down the street
and go forth in different, devious ways. The story in our paper the next
day of the candidacy of Ab Handy threw consternation into the ranks of
the enemy. We had printed the conversation as it had occurred, after
which five men publicly contended that one of their number was a
traitor.

The summer browned the pastures, and the coming of autumn brought
trouble for David Lewis, president of the Imperial Dancing Club,
short-stop for the Maroons, snare-drummer in the band, and operator of
linotypes. We who are at the period of life where love is a harvest
forget the days of the harrow, and are prone to smile at the season of
the seeding. We do not know that the heaviest burden God puts on a
young soul is a burden of the heart. A travelling silk-salesman, with a
haughty manner and a two-hundred-dollar job, saw the blonde in the
Racket Store and began calling at her father's home like the captain of
an army with banners. David, being only an armour-bearer at fifteen
dollars a week, found heartbreak in it all for him. A girl of twenty is
so much older than a boy of twenty-one that the blonde began to assume a
maternal attitude toward the boy, and he took to walking afield on
Sundays, looking at the sky in agony and asking his little
"now-