ame up in good form
presently, winged another flight with Shelby's name as its climax, and
while Mrs. Hilliard split a new pair of gloves in ineffectual applause,
the candidate rose and faced his well-wishers and his foes.

"Mr. Chairman," he began, "men and women."

Bernard Graves was surprised into approval of his unexpected good
taste, never dreaming that a chance remark of Ruth's had moved Shelby
to discard the more hackneyed form of address. Before ever he
presented himself as a candidate for public office, Shelby had been
rated in the note-book of the Secretary of the State Committee as an
effective speaker on "canals, local issues, and currency," with the
further information that he was "strong in rural neighborhoods." This
entry foreshadowed the development of an art which he had since rounded
to high facility. He was considered a spellbinder of uncommon power.

"There are some among you who think harsh things of the way by which
the honor of a congressional nomination has come to the community we
love," he went on boldly. "I ask all such--my honest critics, I make
no doubt--and I ask my avowed supporters to listen to a story. It's an
old story, nearly as old as New Babylon itself, and many of you must
have heard it from the honored lips of the Tuscarora pioneers whose
deeds it chronicles. It is a story of our town in that rough-hewn past
before railroads were dreamed of, before 'Clinton's Ditch' had touched
our wilderness with its mighty wand and made it blossom like the rose.
We owe a vast debt to De Witt Clinton," he digressed to add. "He was
our Moses, and I can never think upon his great achievement without a
thrill of gratitude. I confess to a mania for the Erie Canal."

A man in the body of the audience whom Graves recognized as a canal
bank watch whose appointment Shelby had brought about, called for
three-times-three, but Shelby interfered, saying, "I'd rather you'd
listen than cheer."

"I speak," he continued, "of New Babylon before the coming of the canal
put an end to the log cabins, the spinning-wheels, the ox-sleds, the
corduroy roads, the miasmatic swamps, the wolves, the bears, the fever,
the ague, the blue pill, and all the rude makeshifts and backwoods'
evils which to your forefathers and mine were stern reality. These
were the days when men wore their coat collars high in the back and
small clothes were lengthening into trousers; when veterans of the
Revolution still walked the l