e foreman of the water works gang, or that Tom Williams had the
contract for the stone work on the new court house, it was largely in
payment for services rendered by Ira and Tom in bringing in the Second
Ward for John Kollander for county clerk. The rewards of Ira and Tom in
working for the Doctor were virtue's own; and if re-marking a hundred
ballots was part of that blessed service, well and good. And also it
must be recorded that the foremanship and the stone contract were
somewhat the Doctor's way of showing Mrs. Dooley and Mrs. Williams that
he wished them well.

Doctor Nesbit's scheme of politics included no punishments for his
enemies, and he desired every one for his friend. The round, pink face,
the high-roached, yellow hair, the friendly, blue eyes, had no place for
hate in them, and in the high-pitched, soft voice was no note of terror
to evil doers. His countenance did not betray his power; that was in his
tireless little legs, his effective hands, and his shrewd brain motived
by a heart too kind for the finer moral distinctions that men must make
who go far in this world. Yet because he had a heart, a keen mind, even
without much conscience, and a vision larger than those about him, Dr.
Nesbit was their leader. He did not move in a large sphere, but in his
small sphere he was the central force, the dominating spirit. And off in
a dark corner, Daniel Sands, who was hunger incarnate and nothing more,
spun his web, gathered the dust and the flies and the weaker insects and
waxed fat. To say that his mind ruled Dr. Nesbit's, to say that Daniel
Sands was master and Dr. Nesbit servant in those first decades of
Harvey--whatever the facts may seem in those later days--is one of those
ornately ridiculous travesties upon the truth that facts sometimes are
arranged to make. But how little did they know what they were building!
For they and their kind all over America working in the darkness of
their own selfish desires, were laying footing stones--quite substantial
yet necessary--for the structure of a growing civilization which in its
time, stripped of its scaffolding and extraneous debris, was to stand
among the nations of the earth as a tower of righteousness in a stricken
world.

CHAPTER IV

THE ADAMS FAMILY BIBLE LIES LIKE A GENTLEMAN

How light a line divides comedy from tragedy! When the ass speaks, or
the man brays, there is comedy. Yet fate may stop the mouth of either
man or ass, and in the dumb