But he was regarding the Honorable Isaac Pettit attentively.  Pettit had changed his manner and stood rocking himself slowly on his heels.  He had been a good deal at the capital of late, and this, together with his visit to Thatcher’s house, aroused Harwood’s curiosity.  He wondered whether it were possible that Pettit and Thatcher were conspiring against Bassett:  the fact that he was so heavily in debt to the senator from Fraser seemed to dispose of his fears.  Since his first visit to Fraserville Dan had heard many interesting and amusing things about the editor.  Pettit had begun life as a lawyer, but had relapsed into rural journalism after a futile effort to find clients.  He had some reputation as an orator, and Dan had heard him make a speech distinguished by humor and homely good sense at a meeting of the Democratic State Editorial Association.  Pettit, having once sat beside Henry Watterson at a public dinner in Louisville, had thereafter encouraged as modestly as possible a superstition that he and Mr. Watterson were the last survivors of the “old school” of American editors.  One of his favorite jokes was the use of the editorial “we” in familiar conversation; he said “our wife” and “our sanctum,” and he amused himself by introducing into the “Democrat” trifling incidents of his domestic life, beginning these items with such phrases as, “While we were weeding our asparagus bed in the cool of Tuesday morning, our wife—­noble woman that she is—­” etc., etc.  His squibs of this character, quoted sometimes in metropolitan newspapers, afforded him the greatest glee.  He appeared occasionally as a lecturer, his favorite subject being American humor; and he was able to prove by his scrap-book that he had penetrated as far east as Xenia, Ohio, and as far west as Decatur, Illinois.  Once, so ran Fraserville tradition, he had been engaged for the lyceum course at Springfield, Missouri, but his contract had been canceled when it was found that his discourse was unillumined by the stereopticon, that vivifying accessory being just then in high favor in that community.

Out of his own reading and reflections Allen had reached the conclusion that Franklin, Emerson, and Lincoln were the greatest Americans.  He talked a great deal of Lincoln and of the Civil War, and the soldiers’ monument, in its circular plaza in the heart of the city, symbolized for him all heroic things.  He would sit on the steps in the gray shadow at night, waiting for Dan to finish some task at his office, and Harwood would find him absorbed, dreaming by the singing, foaming fountains.

Allen spoke with a kind of passionate eloquence of This Stupendous Experiment, or This Beautiful Experiment, as he liked to call America.  Dan put Walt Whitman into his hands and afterwards regretted it, for Allen developed an attack of acute Whitmania that tried Dan’s patience severely.  Dan had passed through Whitman at college and emerged safely on the other side.  He begged Allen not to call him “camerado” or lift so often the perpendicular hand.  He suggested to him that while it might be fine and patriotic to declaim