“Well, if you think it right to run the party for a few lordly idlers too proud to mix with the people—­men who think they are better born and better bred than the rest of us—­I don’t want to have anything more to do with it.  I will go elsewhere.”

“That’s your privilege, sir.  The Whigs have plenty of room for self-made men.  Though I do think you are taking too personal a view of to-day’s contest, your defeat was purely a matter of duty.  Moore, whom we have chosen, was a poor Irish settler here before you came.  He was promised the nomination two years ago.”  With a lofty bow the Senator turned and stalked in another direction as if he did not care for the other’s further company.  Even this small and wholly unintended affront worked in the poor, misjudging victim of morbid self-esteem, as a cinder in the eye will torture and blind the sufferer to all the landscape.  Boone mingled no more with the Democrats.  He threw himself with the fervor of the convert into the radical wing of the Whigs, and was brought into close relation with some of the most admired of the band of great men who created the young Republican party.  If Douglas, Dickinson, Cass, Van Buren, Seymour, or any eminent Democrat passing through Warchester stopped to break bread with their colleague Sprague in his Acredale retreat, straightway the splendid Sumner, the Ciceronian Phillips, or the Walpole-Seward, or some other of the shining galaxy of agitators, whose light so shone before men that the whole land was presently brought out of darkness, met at Boone’s table to maintain the balance in distinction.

It was Boone’s liberal purse that paid the expenses of the memorable campaign in the Warchester district, wherein the Democrats were first shaken in their hold.  It was his money that finally secured the seat in Congress for Oswald, who was his tenant and debtor.  It was therefore no surprise when Oswald—­who had been greatly aided in business affairs by Senator Sprague—­passed over the prior claims of his old patron’s son, and gave the cadetship to Wesley Boone, the son of his new liege.  It was looked upon as another step in the ladder of gratitude when Wesley carried off the captaincy in the Acredale company, though everybody knew that young Boone was not in any way so well fitted for the “straps” as Jack.  When one day an item appeared in the local paper to the effect that President Lincoln had shown the “sagacity for which he was so well known, in honoring our distinguished townsman, Elisha Boone, Esq., with the appointment of ambassador to Russia,” everybody thought the statement only natural.  There were many congratulations.  But when, having declined this splendid proffer, the authorities pressed the place of “Assistant Secretary of the Treasury” upon their townsman, the whole village awoke to the fact that all its greatness had not gone when Senator Sprague was gathered to his fathers.