ly: "Three cheers for the man from
Maine!" Instantly he caught at his wits, his color turned, and he lifted
an abashed face to the young girl.

"But, really, you know, that ain't giving nothing away," he apologized,
plucking up heart. "May I do it again?"

The old partisan's eye lighted. "Now they're shouting! That's like old
times! Yes, do it again, boy! Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine!"

He let us lead him to the carriage, the rapturous smile still on his
lips. The "rooter" and I wormed our way through the crowd back to the
seats which the kind Canton man had kept for us.

We were quite like old acquaintances now; and he turned to me at once.
"Was there ever a politician or a statesman, since Henry Clay, loved so
well as James G. Blaine?"

MAX--OR HIS PICTURE

A knock sounded on the principal's door. "That's Florence," she thought;
and she sighed in the same breath. The principal had secretly liked
Florence Raimund, the best of her two hundred girls, for three years;
and, sometimes, she suspected that Florence knew it. Miss Wing sat at
her desk. It was a large desk of oak, always kept in blameless order. No
one could recall seeing more than one letter at a time lying on the
blotter. Any others, yet unread, lay in the wicker tray to the left; the
letters read but not answered were in the wicker tray to the right; the
answered letters were in appropriate pigeonholes or in ashes, Miss Wing
being a firm believer in fire as a confidential agent. Above the desk
hung the most interesting object in the room, to the school-girls; in
fact it would be hard to gage justly the influence this one, mute and
motionless, had over their young imaginations; or how far it was
responsible for the rose-tinted halo that beyond doubt, glorified the
principal for them. The object was a picture, the picture of a young man
in the uniform of a captain in the German cuirassiers. His thick light
hair was brushed back from a fine and candid forehead. A smile creased
his cheek under the warlike curl of his mustachios. It was a smile so
happy and so friendly in its happiness, that it won the beholder. The
eyes were not large, but even in the black and white of a photograph
(the portrait was an ordinary cabinet _carte_) they seemed to sparkle.
The young fellow's figure was superb, and held with a military precision
and jauntiness. One said, looking at the whole presence, "This man is a
good fellow." Viewing him more closely, one might ad