echanical instinct that
gloried in adjustment. He loved to tinker and potter and patch things
up. Now something was wrong with the gearing of his heart action. His
theory was that Anne was for the moment crazy. He could see nothing to
get excited about over the renomination and election of Judge Van Dorn.
The men in the mine where the youth was working as a miner hated Van
Dorn, the people seemed to distrust him as a man more or less, but if he
controlled the nominating convention that ended it with Nathan Perry.
The Judge's family affairs were in no way related to the nomination, as
the youth saw the case. Yet they were affecting the cams and cogs and
pulleys of young Mr. Perry's love affairs, and he felt the matter must
be repaired, and put in running order. For he knew that love affair was
the mainspring of his life. And the mechanic in him--the Yankee that
talked in his rasping, high-keyed tenor voice, that shone from his thin,
lean face, and cadaverous body, the Yankee in him, the dreaming,
sentimental Yankee, half poet and half tinker, fell upon the problem
with unbending will and open mind.

So it came to pass that there entered into the affairs of Judge Thomas
Van Dorn, an element upon which he did not calculate. For he was dealing
only with the material elements of a material universe!

When Nathan Perry came to Brotherton's he sat down in the midst of a
discussion of the Judgeship that began in rather etherial terms. For
Doctor Nesbit was saying:

"Amos, I've got you cornered if you consider the visible universe. She
works like a watch; she's as predestined as a corn sheller. But let me
tell you something--she isn't all visible. There's something back of
matter--there's another side to the shield. I know mighty well there's a
time when my medicine won't help sick folks--and yet they get well. I've
seen a great love flame up in a man's heart or a woman's heart or a
child's in a bed of torture, and when medicine wouldn't take hold I've
seen love burn through the wall between the worlds, and I have seen help
come just as sure as you see the Harvey Hook and Ladder Company coming
rattling down Market Street! Funny old world--funny old world--seventy
rides around the sun--and then the fireworks." After puffing away to
revive his pipe he said: "I sort of got into this way of thinking
recently going over this judgeship fight." He smoked meditatively then
broke out, "Lord, Lord, what an iron-clad, hog-tight, rock-rib