course, after that, we had to appear by self or proxy.  Still, Naguadavick was not then a city, and this standing in a double queue at town-meeting several hours to vote was a bore of the first water; and so, when I found that there was but one Frederic Ingham on the list, and that one of us must give up, I staid at home and finished the letters, (which, indeed, procured for Fothergill his coveted appointment of Professor of Astronomy at Leavenworth,) and I gave Dennis, as we called him, the chance.  Something in the matter gave a good deal of popularity to the Frederic Ingham name; and at the adjourned election, next week, Frederic Ingham was chosen to the legislature.  Whether this was I or Dennis, I never really knew.  My friends seemed to think it was I; but I felt, that, as Dennis had done the popular thing, he was entitled to the honor; so I sent him to Augusta when the time came, and he took the oaths.  And a very valuable member he made.  They appointed him on the Committee on Parishes; but I wrote a letter for him, resigning, on the ground that he took an interest in our claim to the stumpage in the minister’s sixteenths of Gore A, next No. 7, in the 10th Range.  He never made any speeches, and always voted with the minority, which was what he was sent to do.  He made me and himself a great many good friends, some of whom I did not afterwards recognize as quickly as Dennis did my parishioners.  On one or two occasions, when there was wood to saw at home, I kept him at home; but I took those occasions to go to Augusta myself.  Finding myself often in his vacant seat at these times, I watched the proceedings with a good deal of care; and once was so much excited that I delivered my somewhat celebrated speech on the Central School-District question, a speech of which the “State of Maine” printed some extra copies.  I believe there is no formal rule permitting strangers to speak; but no one objected.

Dennis himself, as I said, never spoke at all.  But our experience this session led me to think, that, if, by some such “general understanding” as the reports speak of in legislation daily, every member of Congress might leave a double to sit through those deadly sessions and answer to roll-calls and do the legitimate party-voting, which appears stereotyped in the regular list of Ashe, Bocock, Black, etc., we should gain decidedly in working-power.  As things stand, the saddest State prison I ever visit is that Representatives’ Chamber in Washington.  If a man leaves for an hour, twenty “correspondents” may be howling, “Where was Mr. Pendergrast when the Oregon bill passed?” And if poor Pendergrast stays there!  Certainly, the worst use you can make of a man is to put him in prison!