“You can elect your man if you’ll give me two thousand dollars to refit our club-room with,” one of his political acquaintances once said to him.  “We’ve five hundred voters on the rolls now, and the members vote as one man.  You’d be saving the city twenty times that much if you keep Croker’s man out of the job.  You know that as well as I do.”

“The city can better afford to lose twenty thousand dollars,” Holcombe answered, “than we can afford to give a two-cent stamp for corruption.”

“All right,” said the heeler; “all right, Mr. Holcombe.  Go on.  Fight ’em your own way.  If they’d agree to fight you with pamphlets and circulars you’d stand a chance, sir; but as long as they give out money and you give out reading-matter to people that can’t read, they’ll win, and I naturally want to be on the winning side.”

When the club to which Holcombe belonged finally succeeded in getting the Police Commissioners indicted for blackmailing gambling-houses, Holcombe was, as a matter of course and of public congratulation, on the side of the law; and as Assistant District Attorney—­a position given him on account of his father’s name and in the hope that it would shut his mouth—­distinguished himself nobly.

Of the four commissioners, three were convicted—­the fourth, Patrick Meakim, with admirable foresight having fled to that country from which few criminals return, and which is vaguely set forth in the newspapers as “parts unknown.”

The trial had been a severe one upon the zealous Mr. Holcombe, who found himself at the end of it in a very bad way, with nerves unstrung and brain so fagged that he assented without question when his doctor exiled him from New York by ordering a sea voyage, with change of environment and rest at the other end of it.  Some one else suggested the northern coast of Africa and Tangier, and Holcombe wrote minute directions to the secretaries of all of his reform clubs urging continued efforts on the part of his fellow-workers, and sailed away one cold winter’s morning for Gibraltar.  The great sea laid its hold upon him, and the winds from the south thawed the cold in his bones, and the sun cheered his tired spirit.  He stretched himself at full length reading those books which one puts off reading until illness gives one the right to do so, and so far as in him lay obeyed his doctor’s first command, that he should forget New York and all that pertained to it.  By the time he had reached the Rock he was up and ready to drift farther into the lazy, irresponsible life of the Mediterranean coast, and he had forgotten his struggles against municipal misrule, and was at times for hours together utterly oblivious of his own personality.