umed a mask of comedy. Yet, all said,
the Yankee blood cropped out in face and limb and speech--particularly
in speech; the folk of the Demijohn District did not employ the dialect
of Hosea Biglow, nor a variant of it, but the insistent drawling R to
be heard on every second lip was of no doubtful lineage.

The victor, who sat with folded arms as the perfunctory motion was
seconded and carried, was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh.
Not a few there could recall his sturdy grandfather, a pioneer of
Massachusetts birth, and everybody remembered his spendthrift father
who had squandered the substance of three generations in drink. The
man's own story was an open page which needed no thumbing of the
Tuscarora County history to find. Born under the administration of
Buchanan, the lad's palm was callous with work by the surrender of Lee,
and it knew no softening till his seventeenth year; yet somehow he got
the marrow from the common schools, and in good time won a competitive
scholarship in a narrow little sectarian college which boastfully
called itself a university. Here he acquired two wholesome things: a
perception that the college is but the beginning of education, and a
lasting disgust with bigotry of every stripe. There followed some
years of school-mastering by day and law-book drudgery by night, whose
end was his admission to the bar and a partnership with the man sitting
by his side. Then politics drew him, and, step by step, through rough
and ready service at the polls, in town caucus, county convention, what
not, he secured his footing and finally a seat in the lower house of
the State Legislature. In politics a hobby is often a useful piece of
property, and Shelby, who had a hobby, rode it to success; it made him
a marked man in the first month of his term, it gave him a popular
title, it compelled his renomination and reflection. Nowadays chairmen
always introduced him as the "Champion of Canals," and even at this
moment the catchword with cries of "speech" greeted him from every
quarter of the dingy convention hall. He unfleshed his strong teeth in
a wide-mouthed smile, rose, squared his shoulders, and walked alertly
down an aisle to the platform. Brought thus into the open, under the
yellow glare of a gas-light chandelier, he showed for a simply clad,
businesslike person, with a well-set head and a shaven jaw, whose
firmness a cushion of superfluous flesh could not disguise.

"Thank you,