Texan to the core. His father had been one of the
state's earliest settlers and pioneers. Standifer himself had served
the commonwealth as Indian fighter, soldier, ranger, and legislator.
Much learning he did not claim, but he had drank pretty deep of the
spring of experience.

If other grounds were less abundant, Texas should be well up in the
lists of glory as the grateful republic. For both as republic and
state, it has busily heaped honours and solid rewards upon its sons
who rescued it from the wilderness.

Wherefore and therefore, Luke Coonrod Standifer, son of Ezra
Standifer, ex-Terry ranger, simon-pure democrat, and lucky dweller
in an unrepresented portion of the politico-geographical map, was
appointed Commissioner of Insurance, Statistics, and History.

Standifer accepted the honour with some doubt as to the nature of
the office he was to fill and his capacity for filling it--but
he accepted, and by wire. He immediately set out from the little
country town where he maintained (and was scarcely maintained by) a
somnolent and unfruitful office of surveying and map-drawing. Before
departing, he had looked up under the I's, S's and H's in the
"Encyclopaedia Britannica" what information and preparation toward
his official duties that those weighty volumes afforded.

A few weeks of incumbency diminished the new commissioner's awe of
the great and important office he had been called upon to conduct.
An increasing familiarity with its workings soon restored him to
his accustomed placid course of life. In his office was an old,
spectacled clerk--a consecrated, informed, able machine, who
held his desk regardless of changes of administrative heads. Old
Kauffman instructed his new chief gradually in the knowledge of the
department without seeming to do so, and kept the wheels revolving
without the slip of a cog.

Indeed, the Department of Insurance, Statistics, and History
carried no great heft of the burden of state. Its main work was
the regulating of the business done in the state by foreign
insurance companies, and the letter of the law was its guide. As
for statistics--well, you wrote letters to county officers, and
scissored other people's reports, and each year you got out a report
of your own about the corn crop and the cotton crop and pecans and
pigs and black and white population, and a great many columns of
figures headed "bushels" and "acres" and "square miles," etc.--and
there you were. History? The