_ a little exercise, _now_ and again, would be
_good_ for them. We _might_ drop a dish into the pool every week or so,
Dorothy, just to stir them up."

"It might go for a while," said young Nisbet, "but any old football
player like myself, Mrs. Rathbawne, will tell you that you can't work
the same trick more than just a certain number of times."

"Interruption, for example!" added Dorothy, and laughed across at him,
deliciously, with her eyes.

XII

DIOGENES

It was during the tenth week of the strike at the Rathbawne Mills that
the "Kenton City Record" made its long-remembered attack upon
Lieutenant-Governor Barclay. The arraignment was one unparalleled for
venom, even in the columns of that most notoriously scurrilous journal
in the state, and, withal, there was about it a devilish ingenuity, a
distortion of facts so slight as to defy refutation, and so plausible as
to carry conviction. It was the last blow in the long series of
discouragements which Barclay had suffered since his inauguration, and
for the moment he was completely unmanned. He was at no loss, however,
to trace the source from which the ingeniously perverted facts had been
obtained. Not even McGrath, with his intimate knowledge of all that went
forward at the capitol, could have supplied information so detailed.
The hand of Elijah Abbott was traceable in every line of the attack.
Their conversation, on the afternoon when he had first spoken to Barclay
of the impending strike, was reproduced almost word for word, as well as
that on the occasion when McGrath had been present, and therefrom the
"Record" went on to deduce that not even Peter Rathbawne, with all his
obstinacy, all his blindness to the welfare of his employees, was
responsible for their present destitution in the same sense as was the
Lieutenant-Governor, who might have avoided the strike by a conciliatory
word, and who, instead, had advised Mr. Rathbawne to fight the
working-people until the last cent of their money should be exhausted
and the last drop of their blood should be shed.

"Incompetency," said the article in part, "is what we long since learned
to expect from John Hamilton Barclay. Gross neglect of public duty,
flagrant callousness to responsibility, contemptuous indifference to the
interests of the citizens whose votes placed him where he is,--all
these have been part and parcel of his attitude since the unfortunate
moment of his election. But even in him we had