treated. "You will know how."

Sprague shook his head.

"He was positive on that point. It must be you or nobody."

"I doubt if it's worth while."

The editor lost patience.

"It was you who reminded me that we lacked the concrete. Now I offer
it to you."

"But in such a shape!"

"Can you quibble over that--and in politics?"

"No one who knows Jap Hinchey's character would believe him under oath."

Sprague's reply was astute.

"I'm thinking of those who don't know him," said he. "The district is
wide."

"And an affidavit is an affidavit?" His smile was sardonic. "Very
well. I'll see him. What is Jap's At Home?"

"You will find him fishing on the dock behind his shanty, probably.
I'd follow this thing up promptly, Bernard."

"Yes," promised the candidate, listlessly. "I will."

Alone, he fingered his manuscript, read it drearily, and of a sudden
tore it into little bits, the mood which gendered it gone beyond
recall. The sordid necessity of seeing Hinchey taught him afresh the
folly of his dabbling in politics at all, and his whole being revolted
against the contact with humanity in the raw which even mugwumpery
seemed to entail. Left to himself, Sprague might have headed his own
John Brown raid into the established order of things; led it with
brilliancy perhaps, in any case with honest zeal. Yet the root of his
discontent struck rather deeper than Jasper Hinchey and the cold
waterish zone of reform; Ruth had her part in it. He somehow reasoned
that his course merited her approval and encouragement; it had met with
banter. So gyved, lagged the hope of the independents to his task.

Few towns, however small, lack their moral plague-spot, and Graves's
errand bent him toward New Babylon's, a web of alleys styled the Flats,
spun behind the business centre among the docks and rotting warehouses
of a vanished commerce. The Flats had its business too--groggeries and
a music hall where "sacred concerts" were given on Sunday nights and
men had been stabbed on pay-day; groggeries, the music hall--and worse.
The young man threaded gingerly into its dingy precincts, and by dint
of a handful of Italian, picked up in a Roman winter's sojourn to be
oddly practised on a local washerwoman sousing gay garments in the
amber fluid of the Erie Canal, he singled out the Hinchey hovel from
the squalid score it resembled. Before the sagging threshold tumbled a
many-complexioned brood of children,--they seemed