gh! rah! rah!
rah! Harvard!" I cried, as I seized the lovely orator in my arms and
hugged her to my breast, thereby, to adopt her own words, squeezing out
of her the little breath which she had left. "Bravo, Josephine! If
you were to take the stump it would be I and not Mr. Spinney who would
have a walk-over."

"At any rate, Fred," she continued, after she had regained her breath
and recomposed her ruffled hair, "I can put in a word to help you here
and there among our friends. It was on the tip of my tongue yesterday
to call Rev. Bradley Mason's attention to the fact that you were a
candidate, in the hope that he might make just a slight allusion to it
from the pulpit. Not directly by name, of course; he couldn't do that
very well; but he might speak of the importance of aiding those who
were battling for the noble cause of pure government, so that people
could guess what he meant. I didn't do it," she added, a little
ruefully, "because I was afraid you might possibly not like it, and
there was plenty of time in which to give him the hint."

"Thank goodness you didn't say a word on the subject," I answered. "It
wouldn't have done at all."

For the next six weeks our house was a veritable bureau of political
activity. Although Josephine lived up to her threat of keeping an eye
on Nicholas Long, she admitted before many days had passed that he was
what my boys call a thorough-going hustler, and that he was determined
to leave no portion of my Congressional acreage unsown with Democratic
seed. This farming metaphor was borrowed from Nick, who had many
others at his command suited to the various classes of constituents he
wished to reach. His brain fairly buzzed with fertile expedients
devised to catch this and that portion of the popular vote. He was a
great believer in documents. As he expressed it, the territory must be
plastered with statistics and other printed matter, which were much
more serviceable nowadays than in the past. He said that formerly the
average voter flung everything into the waste-basket and went to the
polls simply on the strength of party prejudice fortified by the
glamour of a torchlight procession, but that now he read and thought,
and refused to support the party candidate merely because he was the
party candidate. He deluged the community with copies of my letter of
acceptance, and three days later overwhelmed the postal service with a
batch of circulars embodying a short, pith