mmittee. It announced his coming, and warned the autocrat of the
North Country of the plot. The chairman knew. The plotters had been
betrayed to him, and from his distance he enjoyed a perspective which is
helpful in making political estimates. But Thelismer Thornton only
chuckled over Luke Presson's fears. He went back to bed for another nap.

When he came down and ate breakfast alone in the big mess-room, which he
had not allowed the carpenters to narrow by an inch, he was still amused
by the chairman's panic. As a politician older than any of them, a man
who had served his district fifty years in the legislature, he refused
to believe--intrenched there in his fortress in the north--that there
was danger abroad in the State.

"Reformers, eh?" He sneered the word aloud in the big room of echoes.
"Well, I can show them one up here. There's Ivus Niles!"

And at that moment Ivus Niles was marching into the village from the Jo
Quacca hills, torch for the tinder that had been prepared. It is said
that a cow kicked over a lantern that started the conflagration of its
generation. In times when political tinder is dry there have been great
men who have underestimated reform torches.

It was a bland June morning. The Hon. Thelismer Thornton was bland, too,
in agreement with the weather. A good politician always agrees with what
cannot be helped.

He stood in the door of "The Barracks" and gazed out upon the rolling
St. John hills--a lofty, ponderous hulk of a man, thatched with white
hair, his big, round face cherubic still in spite of its wrinkles. He
lighted a cigar, and gazed up into the cloudless sky with the mental
endorsement that it was good caucus weather. Then he trudged out across
the grass-plot and climbed into his favorite seat. It was an arm-chair
set high in the tangle of the roots of an overturned spruce-tree. The
politicians of the county called that seat "The Throne," and for a
quarter of a century the Hon. Thelismer Thornton had been nicknamed "The
Duke of Fort Canibas." Add that the nicknames were not ill bestowed.
Such was the Hon. Thelismer Thornton.

He had brought newspapers in his pockets. He set his eyeglasses on his
bulging nose, and began to read.

In the highway below him teams went jogging into the village. There
were fuzzy Canadian horses pulling buckboards sagging under the weight
of all the men who could cling on. There were top carriages and even a
hayrack well loaded with men.

Occasio