in their top-loftiness, but if they must have us, we cannot well get along without them—­without the colour and variety which they lend to a gray world.  I have spent many a precious moment alone in my fields looking up the road (with what wistful casualness!) for some new Socrates or Mark Twain, and I have not been wholly disappointed when I have had to content myself with the Travelling Evangelist or the Syrian Woman who comes this way monthly bearing her pack of cheap suspenders and blue bandana handkerchiefs.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Grayson,” said the Honourable Mr. Caldwell, taking off his large hat and pausing with one foot on my step.

“Good afternoon, sir,” I responded, “won’t you come up?”

He sat down in the chair opposite me with a certain measured and altogether impressive dignity.  I cannot say that he was exactly condescending in his manners, yet he made me feel that it was no small honour to have so considerable a person sitting there on the porch with me.  At the same time he was outwardly not without a sort of patient deference which was evidently calculated to put me at my ease.  Oh, he had all the arts of the schooled politician!  He knew to the last shading just the attitude that he as a great man, a leader in Congress, a dominant force in his party, a possible candidate for Governor (and yet always a seeker for the votes of the people!) must observe in approaching a free farmer—­like me—­sitting at ease in his shirt-sleeves on his own porch, taking a moment’s rest after dinner.  It was a perfect thing to see!

He had evidently heard, what was not altogether true, that I was a questioner of authority, a disturber of the political peace, and that (concretely) I was opposing him for reelection.  And it was as plain as a pikestaff that he was here to lay down the political law to me.  He would do it smilingly and patiently, but firmly.  He would use all the leverage of his place, his power, his personal appearance, to crush the presumptuous uprising against his authority.

I confess my spirits rose at the thought.  What in this world is more enthralling than the meeting of an unknown adversary upon the open field, and jousting him a tourney.  I felt like some modern Robin Hood facing the panoplied authority of the King’s man.

And what a place and time it was for a combat—­in the quietude of the summer afternoon, no sound anywhere breaking the still warmth and sweetness except the buzzing of bees in the clematis at the end of the porch—­and all about the green countryside, woods and fields and old fences—­and the brown road leading its venturesome way across a distant hill toward the town.

After explaining who he was—­I told him I had recognized him on sight—­we opened with a volley of small shot.  We peppered one another with harmless comments on the weather and the state of the crops.  He advanced cabbages and I countered with sugar-beets.  I am quite aware that there are good tacticians who deprecate the use of skirmish lines and the desultory fire of the musketry of small talk.  They would advance in grim silence and open at once with the crushing fire of their biggest guns.