ratching sound; a flame; a glow of light held at arm's length by
the recreant follower of Destiny illuminating a tableau which shall
end the ignominious chronicle--a maid with unkissed, curling,
contemptuous lips slowly lifting the lamp chimney and allowing the
wick to ignite; then waving a scornful and abjuring hand toward the
staircase--the unhappy Tansey, erstwhile champion in the prophetic
lists of fortune, ingloriously ascending to his just and certain
doom, while (let us imagine) half within the wings stands the
imminent figure of Fate jerking wildly at the wrong strings, and
mixing things up in her usual able manner.

XVI

A DEPARTMENTAL CASE

In Texas you may travel a thousand miles in a straight line. If
your course is a crooked one, it is likely that both the distance
and your rate of speed may be vastly increased. Clouds there
sail serenely against the wind. The whip-poor-will delivers its
disconsolate cry with the notes exactly reversed from those of his
Northern brother. Given a drought and a subsequently lively rain,
and lo! from a glazed and stony soil will spring in a single night
blossomed lilies, miraculously fair. Tom Green County was once the
standard of measurement. I have forgotten how many New Jerseys and
Rhode Islands it was that could have been stowed away and lost in
its chaparral. But the legislative axe has slashed Tom Green into
a handful of counties hardly larger than European kingdoms. The
legislature convenes at Austin, near the centre of the state; and,
while the representative from the Rio Grande country is gathering
his palm-leaf fan and his linen duster to set out for the capital,
the Pan-handle solon winds his muffler above his well-buttoned
overcoat and kicks the snow from his well-greased boots ready for
the same journey. All this merely to hint that the big ex-republic
of the Southwest forms a sizable star on the flag, and to prepare
for the corollary that things sometimes happen there uncut to
pattern and unfettered by metes and bounds.

The Commissioner of Insurance, Statistics, and History of the State
of Texas was an official of no very great or very small importance.
The past tense is used, for now he is Commissioner of Insurance
alone. Statistics and history are no longer proper nouns in the
government records.

In the year 188--, the governor appointed Luke Coonrod Standifer to
be the head of this department. Standifer was then fifty-five years
of age, and a