ay it behind the
woodpile."

Shelby laughed, and sought to woo back his mood of charity toward all,
but it was futile. The widow's mite of hostile criticism had leavened
the whole lump with bitterness. Nevertheless, he bridled his tongue.

Work came hard for the moment, and his eyes strayed past his papers
through an open window and spied Ruth Temple's slender shape in the
lawn below. The dewy freshness of the morning seemed to touch her
youth as it did the asters and belated hollyhocks of the quaint garden
into which she passed as he watched. Then Bernard Graves suddenly cut
into the picture, and drew a newspaper from his pocket, directing her
attention to something which amused him. But Ruth did not laugh.
Shelby clearly saw her color change.

A heavy step outside his door heralded the coming of the Hon. Seneca
Bowers. The county leader was in no mood for idle words, and looked as
Grant may have looked when about to pass judgment on a disgraced
soldier.

"Seen the _Whig_?" he asked curtly, when William Irons had been
despatched to the post-office.

"The _Whig_! No, I don't take it."

"I'd advise you to subscribe."

Shelby's face sobered with a premonition of misfortune.

"What's to pay now?" he asked.

Bowers struck open a copy of Volney Sprague's newspaper, and with
stubby rigid thumb guided the candidate's glance to an editorial.

"Read that, sir."

His tone was a new thing in their intercourse, but without remark
Shelby read:--

"AN ELOQUENT THIEF"

"Before a crowded mass-meeting last evening, Calvin Ross Shelby,
congressional candidate for the suffrages of an intelligent people,
stultified alike his hearers and himself. We shall not dignify his
specious appeal to local pride with the easy exposure of its fallacy;
the victory were too cheap; but since he glibly sought to establish a
parallel between his own questionable political methods and the
legendary deeds of the founders of our community, we too will frame
from his eloquence a parallel which we commend to the orator and to his
electors. In the newspaper business we call it the deadly parallel.

"Do you realize what this "When you can enlarge
talk about the dollar means, if your farm by changing the
true? It means that all you figures in your deeds; when
need do to increase the acreage your dairymaid can make more
of your farm is to change butter and cheese by watering
the figures in your