Agamemnons.  Allen asked questions about these and mourned their passing.  Harrison, the twenty-third President; Gresham, of the brown eyes, judge and cabinet minister; Hendricks, the courtly gentleman, sometime Vice-President; “Uncle Joe” McDonald and “Dan” Voorhees, Senators in Congress, and loved in their day by wide constituencies.  These had vanished, but Dan and Allen made a pious pilgrimage one night to sit at the feet of David Turpie, who had been a Senator in two widely separated eras, and who, white and venerable, like Aigyptos knew innumerable things.

The cloaked poets once visible in Market Street had vanished before our chronicle opens, with the weekly literary journals in which they had shone, but Dan was able to introduce Allen to James Whitcomb Riley in a bookshop frequented by the poet; and that was a great day in Allen’s life.  He formed the habit of lying in wait for the poet and walking with him, discussing Keats and Burns, Stevenson and Kipling, and others of their common admirations.  One day of days the poet took Allen home with him and read him a new, unpublished poem, and showed him a rare photograph of Stevenson and the outside of a letter just received from Kipling, from the uttermost parts of the world.  It was a fine thing to know a poet and to speak with him face to face,—­particularly a poet who sang of his own soil as Allen wished to know it.  Still, Allen did not quite understand how it happened that a poet who wrote of farmers and country-town folk wore eyeglasses and patent-leather shoes and carried a folded silk umbrella in all weathers.

The active politicians who crossed his horizon interested Allen greatly; the rougher and more uncouth they were the more he admired them.  They were figures in the Great Experiment, no matter how sordid or contemptible Harwood pronounced them.  He was always looking for “types” and “Big” Jordan, the Republican chief, afforded him the greatest satisfaction.  He viewed the local political scene from an angle that Harwood found amusing, and Dan suggested that it must be because the feudal taint and the servile tradition are still in our blood that we submit so tamely to the rule of petty lordlings.  In his exalted moments Allen’s ideas shot far into the air, and Dan found it necessary to pull him back to earth.

“I hardly see a Greek frieze carved of these brethren,” Dan remarked one night as they lounged at the Whitcomb when a meeting of the state committee was in progress.  “These fellows would make you weep if you knew as much about them as I do.  There’s one of the bright lights now—­the Honorable Ike Pettit, of Fraser.  The Honorable Ike isn’t smart enough to be crooked; he’s the bellowing Falstaff of the Hoosier Democracy.  I wonder who the laugh’s on just now; he’s shaking like a jelly fish over something.”

“Oh, I know him!  He and father are great chums; he was at the house for dinner last night.”

“What!”