ound."

"Strikes you that way, does it?" Bowers emitted with a cloud of smoke.

"Why, yes. You don't consider such a paper dangerous?"

"All newspapers are dangerous in politics; there's none too mean to
have its following. The _Whig_ has influence."

"It's a one-horse paper," reiterated Shelby.

"M-yes; it is a slow coach," Bowers admitted; "but it suits a lot of
people. They respect it because it keeps the old name and jogs along
in the old gait it had under Volney's father before him. It's been a
stanch party paper, too, and that without soliciting a dollar's worth
of public advertising or political pap of any description. The _Whig_
doesn't often kick over the traces. The Greeley campaign was its last
bolt."

"Well, the milk's spilt," said Shelby, with strenuous cheerfulness;
"we've one reason the more to make next week's ratification meeting a
rousing success. What did you think of our little welcome at the club
last night?"

Bowers grinned.

"Mrs. Hilliard managed it first-class," he said; "but I felt cheap when
we came in."

"So did I. The scheme seemed a good one when she suggested it, but
when it came right down to pulling it off I would have sold out for
thirty cents on the dollar. It takes lovely woman to do those things.
She has her uses in politics, eh?"

"M-yes," Bowers answered in half assent; "but she's an uncertain
quantity. Like grandsire's musket, she's as likely to kill behind as
before."

The vine-screened window in which they now talked overlooked the
neighboring Temple house, a dignified sentry at the point where the
leisured street forsook the chaffer of the town to climb amidst arching
elms and maples, above whose gaudy autumn masses rose the dome of the
courthouse and the spires of many churches. It was an old-fashioned
Georgian structure with white columns clear-cut against its weathered
brick; at either side of the low steps a great hydrangea, its glory
waning with the summer, lifted its showy clusters from an urn; while
walk and carriage drive alike sauntered to the street through hedgerows
of box. The mouth of the driveway at this moment gleamed white from
the kerchiefs of a knot of Polish children estray from the quarry
district, who, at a laughing nod from Ruth, swooped, a chattering
barbaric horde, on the fallen apples dotting a bit of sward with yellow
and red. Shelby smilingly watched the scramble to its speedy end, and
turned to the giver of the feast, who