sed a constituency extending to the Temple lawn, which, in
default of definite news, it was edifying with views of foreign travel
and cartoons bearing on the larger issues of the election. Within
doors the telegraph operator was already installed at the ancient table
which had graced the grand-paternal distillery, and William Irons was
making good the tedium of a dreary day in the deserted office by
goggling from the ticking instrument to a consignment of iced champagne
just arrived from the Tuscarora House.

Shelby was in rare fettle.

"William, thou abstemious youth," he addressed the clerk, "I am tempted
to empty one of these cold bottles down your scandalized neck and pack
you off with another for the Widow Weatherwax!"

He had the youth carry the wine to the rear room and set out glasses
against the coming of his friends, drinking a bumper meanwhile to
William's good health and the sentiment Confusion to Fusion. Never a
solitary winebibber, and William remaining recalcitrant, he returned to
the outer office and demanded "no heeltaps" of the operator and Bowers.
This accomplished to his taste, he crammed a greenback into the dazed
clerk's fingers and dismissed him for the night with the injunction to
buy and blow the biggest tin horn in New Babylon.

His intimates now began to drift in, and the toast of Confusion to
Fusion enjoyed a wide popularity, the telegraph operator and the county
chairman being the only ones permitted to flag in the exacting
ceremonies which the occasion required.

"I'll do my hurrahing when the returns are in," said Bowers, and
stripping to his shirt sleeves he took his station under a drop-light
and made ready to figure the local result.

But the local returns were tardy. It developed early that throughout
the Demijohn split tickets had prevailed to an unprecedented extent.
Heretofore reliable localities ran after strange socialistic and
prohibition gods, to avoid voting for either of the leading candidates;
while Graves and Shelby both gained support in quarters where it would
have been sheer fatuity to hope. The hurrying news from the country at
large shamed the dribble at the threshold. Texas and Vermont, those
stock commonplaces of election night humor, went Democratic and
Republican by the usual majorities, and all signs pointed to a sweeping
victory for Shelby's party in state and Union. And still Tuscarora and
the Demijohn aped the Sphinx.

Men elsewhere became curious.