oof by means of the fire-escape and there rehearse
speeches which I will make this fall in case it should be discovered at
either of the conventions that my name alone can heal the rupture in the
party and prevent its works from falling out.

I think my voice is better also that it was either four, eight, twelve
or sixteen years ago, and it does not tire me so much to think of things
to say from the tail-gate of a train as it did when I first began to
refrain from presenting my name to conventions.

According to my notion, our candidate should be a plain man, a magnetic
but hairless patriot, who should be suddenly thought of by a majority of
the convention and nominated by acclamation. He should not be a
hide-bound politician, but on the contrary he should be greatly
startled, while down cellar sprouting potatoes, to learn that he has
been nominated. That's the kind of man who always surprises everybody
with his sagacity when an emergency arises.

In going down my cellar stairs the committee will do well to avoid
stepping on a large and venomous dog who sleeps on the top stair. Or I
will tie him in the barn if I can be informed when I am liable to be
startled.

[Illustration]

I have always thought that the neatest method of calling a man to
public life was the one adopted some years since in the case of
Cincinnatus. He was one day breaking a pair of nervous red steers in the
north field. It was a hot day in July, and he was trying to summer
fallow a piece of ground where the jimson weeds grew seven feet high.
The plough would not scour, and the steers had turned the yoke twice on
him. Cincinnatus had hung his toga on a tamarac pole to strike a furrow
by, and hadn't succeeded in getting the plough in more than twice in
going across. Dressing as he did in the Roman costume of 458 B. C., the
blackberry vines had scratched his massive legs till they were a sight
to behold. He had scourged Old Bright and twisted the tail of Bolly till
he was sick at heart. All through the long afternoon, wearing a hot,
rusty helmet with rabbit-skin ear tabs he had toiled on, when suddenly a
majority of the Roman voters climbed over the fence and asked him to
become dictator in place of Spurious Melius.

Putting on his toga and buckling an old hame strap around his loins he
said: "Gentlemen, if you will wait till I go to the house and get some
vaseline on my limbs I will do your dictating for you as low as you have
ever had it done."