There was more to the effect, for instance, that the American people and the people of this county should be ashamed to think that such crimes should be permitted and go unpunished, and that this was a fair sample.  The clerk, realizing the importance of Mr. White in the community, and the likelihood of his following up his charges very vigorously, quietly followed his address in a very deferential way, jotting down such salient features as he had time to write.  When he was through, however, he ventured to lift his voice in protest.

“You know, Mr. White,” he said, “Sheffels is a member of our party, and was appointed by us.  Of course, now, it’s too bad that this thing should have happened, and he ought to be dropped, but if you are going to make a public matter of it in this way it may hurt us in the election next month.”

The old patriarch threw back his head and gazed at him in the most blazing way, almost without comprehension, apparently, of so petty a view.

“What!” he exclaimed.  “What’s that got to do with it?  Do you want the Democratic Party to starve the poor and beat the insane?”

The opposition was rather flattened by the reply, and left the old gentleman to storm out.  For once, at least, in this particular instance, anyhow, he had purified the political atmosphere, as if by lightning, and within the month following the offending attendant was dropped.

Politics, however, had long known his influence in a similar way.  There was a time when he was the chief political figure in the county, and possessed the gift of oratory, apparently, beyond that of any of his fellow-citizens.  Men came miles to hear him, and he took occasion to voice his views on every important issue.  It was his custom in those days, for instance, when he had anything of special importance to say, to have printed at his own expense a few placards announcing his coming, which he would then carry to the town selected for his address and personally nail up.  When the hour came, a crowd, as I am told, was never wanting.  Citizens and farmers of both parties for miles about usually came to hear him.

Personally I never knew how towering his figure had been in the past, or how truly he had been admired, until one day I drifted in upon a lone bachelor who occupied a hut some fifteen miles from the patriarch’s home and who was rather noted in the community at the time that I was there for his love of seclusion and indifference to current events.  He had not visited the nearest neighboring village in something like five years, and had not been to the moderate-sized county seat in ten.  Naturally he treasured memories of his younger days and more varied activity.

“I don’t know,” he said to me one day, in discussing modern statesmen and political fame in general, “but getting up in politics is a queer game.  I can’t understand it.  Men that you’d think ought to get up don’t seem to.  It doesn’t seem to be real greatness that helps ’em along.”