e had yielded to that
aggressive personage a rank of high importance in their midst.

Bruce stepped forth from his stairway, crossed Main Street, and strode
up the shady Court House walk. On the left side of the walk, a-tiptoe
in an arid fountain, was poised a gracious nymph of cast-iron, so
chastely garbed as to bring to the cheek of elderly innocence no
faintest flush. On the walk's right side stood a rigid statue,
suggesting tetanus in the model, of the city's founder, Col. Davy
West, wearing a coonskin cap and leaning with conscious dignity upon a
long deer rifle.

Bruce entered the dingy Court House, mounted a foot-worn wooden
stairway, browned with the ambrosial extract of two generations of
tobacco-chewing litigants, and passed into a damp and gloomy chamber.
This room was the office of the prosecuting attorney of Calloway
County. That the incumbent might not become too depressed by his
environment, the walls were cheered up by a steel engraving of Daniel
Webster, frowning with multitudinous thought, and by a crackled map of
Indiana--the latter dotted by industrious flies with myriad nameless
cities.

Three men arose from about the flat-topped desk in the centre of the
room, the prosecutor, the Reverend Doctor Sherman, and a rather
smartly dressed man whom Bruce remembered to have seen once or twice
but whom he did not know. With the first two the editor shook hands,
and the third was introduced to him as Mr. Marcy, the agent of the
Acme Filter Company, which had installed the filtering plant of the
new water-works.

Bruce turned in his brusque manner to the prosecuting attorney.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"Suppose we all sit down first," suggested the prosecutor.

They did so, and Kennedy regarded Bruce with a solemn, weighty stare.
He was a lank, lantern-jawed, frock-coated gentleman of thirty-five,
with an upward rolling forelock and an Adam's-apple that throbbed in
his throat like a petrified pulse. He was climbing the political
ladder, and he was carefully schooling himself into that dignity and
poise and appearance of importance which should distinguish the
deportment of the public man.

"Well, what is it?" demanded Bruce shortly. "About the water-works?"

"Yes," responded Kennedy. "The water-works, Mr. Bruce, is, I hardly
need say, a source of pride to us all. To you especially it has had a
large significance. You have made it a theme for a continuous
agitation in your paper. You have arg