a woman whose life has been spent on a humble farm find that her son has won a place among people of distinction in a city which is to her the capital of the Universe.  There were times when Dan wished to be free of Bassett.  He had reached a point where Bassett was not only of little service to him, but where he felt he was of little use to Bassett.  And it was irksome to find that all the local newspapers, except the “Courier,” constantly identified the Boordman Building with Bassett’s political activities.

Amid all the agitations of the campaign Dan had seen as much as possible of Sylvia.  The settlement of Andrew Kelton’s estate gave him an excuse for consulting her frequently, but he sought her frankly for the pleasure of seeing her.  He found that she was a good deal at Mrs. Owen’s, and it was pleasanter to run in upon her there than at Elizabeth House, where they must needs share the parlor with other callers.  Often he and Allen met at Mrs. Owen’s and debated the questions that were forever perplexing young Thatcher’s eager mind,—­debates that Mrs. Owen suffered to run so far and then terminated with a keen observation that left no more to be said, sending them to the pantry to forage for food and drink.  Thatcher had resented for a time Harwood’s participation in his humiliation at the convention; but his ill-feeling had not been proof against Allen’s warm defense.  Thatcher’s devotion to his son had in it a kind of pathos, and it was not in him to vent his spleen against his son’s best friend.

A few days after the election Thatcher invited Harwood to join him and Allen in a week’s shooting in the Kankakee where he owned a house-boat that Allen had never seen.

“Come up, Dan, and rest your voice.  It’s a good place to loaf, and we’ll take John Ware along as our moral uplifter.  Maybe we’ll pot a few ducks, but if we don’t we’ll get away from our troubles for a little while anyhow.”

The house-boat proved to be commodious and comfortable, and the ducks scarce enough to make the hunter earn his supper.  I may say in parenthesis that long before Thatcher’s day many great and good Hoosiers scattered birdshot over the Kankakee marshes—­which, alack! have been drained to increase Indiana’s total area of arable soil.  “Lew” Wallace and other Hoosier generals and judges used to hunt ducks on the Kankakee; and Maurice Thompson not only camped there, but wrote a poem about the marshes,—­a poem that is a poem,—­all about the bittern and the plover and the heron, which always, at the right season, called him away from the desk and the town to try his bow (he was the last of the toxophilites!) on winged things he scorned to destroy with gunpowder.  (Oh what a good fellow you were, Maurice Thompson, and what songs you wrote of our lakes and rivers and feathered things!  And how I gloated over those songs of fair weather in old “Atlantics” in my grandfather’s garret, before they were bound into that slim, long volume with the arrow-pierced heron on its cover!)