servation that
left no more to be said, sending them to the pantry to forage for food
and drink. Thatcher had resented for a time Harwood's participation in
his humiliation at the convention; but his ill-feeling had not been
proof against Allen's warm defense. Thatcher's devotion to his son had
in it a kind of pathos, and it was not in him to vent his spleen against
his son's best friend.

A few days after the election Thatcher invited Harwood to join him and
Allen in a week's shooting in the Kankakee where he owned a house-boat
that Allen had never seen.

"Come up, Dan, and rest your voice. It's a good place to loaf, and we'll
take John Ware along as our moral uplifter. Maybe we'll pot a few ducks,
but if we don't we'll get away from our troubles for a little while
anyhow."

The house-boat proved to be commodious and comfortable, and the ducks
scarce enough to make the hunter earn his supper. I may say in
parenthesis that long before Thatcher's day many great and good Hoosiers
scattered birdshot over the Kankakee marshes--which, alack! have been
drained to increase Indiana's total area of arable soil. "Lew" Wallace
and other Hoosier generals and judges used to hunt ducks on the
Kankakee; and Maurice Thompson not only camped there, but wrote a poem
about the marshes,--a poem that _is_ a poem,--all about the bittern and
the plover and the heron, which always, at the right season, called him
away from the desk and the town to try his bow (he was the last of the
toxophilites!) on winged things he scorned to destroy with gunpowder.
(Oh what a good fellow you were, Maurice Thompson, and what songs you
wrote of our lakes and rivers and feathered things! And how I gloated
over those songs of fair weather in old "Atlantics" in my grandfather's
garret, before they were bound into that slim, long volume with the
arrow-pierced heron on its cover!)

John Ware, an ancient and honorable son of the tribe of Nimrod, was the
best of comrades. The striking quality in Ware was his beautiful
humanness, which had given him a peculiar hold upon men. Thatcher was
far from being a saint, but, like many other cheerful sinners in our
capital, he had gone to church in the days when Ware occupied the First
Congregational pulpit. A good many years had passed since Ware had been
a captain of cavalry, chasing Stuart's boys in the Valley of Virginia,
but he was still a capital wing shot. A house-boat is the best place in
the world for talk, and t