Peter spoke twice in the next week in small halls in his ward.  He had good audiences, and he spoke well, if simply.

“There ain’t no fireworks in his stuff,” said the ward satirist.  “He don’t unfurl the American flag, nor talk about liberty and the constitution.  He don’t even speak of us as noble freemen.  He talks just as if he thought we was in a saloon.  A feller that made that speech about the babies ought to treat us to something moving.”

That was what many of the ward thought.  Still they went because they wanted to see if he wouldn’t burst out suddenly.  They felt that Peter had unlimited potentialities in the way of eloquence (for eloquence to them meant the ability to move the emotions) and merely saved his powers.  Without quite knowing it they found what he had to say interesting.  He brought the questions at issue straight back to elementary forms.  He showed just how each paragraph in the platform would directly affect, not the state, but the “district.”

“He’s thoroughly good,” the party leaders were told.  “If he would abuse the other side a little more, and stick in a little tinsel and calcium light he would be great.”

So he was called upon to speak elsewhere in the city.  He worked at one of the polls on election day, and was pleased to find that he was able to prevent a little of the “trading” for which Kennedy had arranged.  His ward went Democratic, as was a foregone conclusion, but by an unusually large majority, and Peter found that he and Dennis were given the credit for it, both in the ward, and at headquarters.  Catlin was elected, and the Assembly had been won.  So Peter felt that his three months’ work had not been an entire failure.  The proceeds of his speeches had added also two hundred and fifty dollars to his savings bank account, and one hundred more to the account of “Peter Stirling, Trustee.”

CHAPTER XXV.

VARIOUS KINDS OF SOCIETY.

Peter spent Christmas with his mother, and found her very much worried over his “salooning.”

“It’s first steps, Peter, that do the mischief,” she told him.

“But, mother, I only go to talk with the men.  Not to drink.”

“You’ll come to that later.  The devil’s paths always start straight, my boy, but they end in wickedness.  Promise me you won’t go any more.”

“I can’t do that, mother.  I am trying to help the men, and you ought not ask me to stop doing what may aid others.”

“Oh, my boy, my boy!” sobbed the mother.

“If you could only understand it, mother, as I have come to, you wouldn’t mind.  Here, the saloon is chiefly a loafing place for the lazy and shiftless, but in New York, it’s very different.  It’s the poor man’s club.  If you could see the dark, cold, foul-aired tenements where they live, and then the bright, warm, cheerful saloons, that are open to all, you would see that it isn’t