“And I am sure, my dear Van Addle,” returned Enfield, “you are heartily welcome to aught I may know or believe on the subject.  A great noble of Rome observed that to direct a wanderer aright was like lighting another man’s candle with one’s own; it assisted the fortunes of the beneficiary without subtracting from the estate of the Samaritan.  For myself, I need neither the Roman argument nor the Roman example to create within me a benevolent willingness to hang a lantern in the tower of truth for the guidance of any gentleman now groping as to the actual status of Mr. Croker with Tammany Hall.

“It requires no word to those initiate to convince them that Mr. Croker no longer sits on the throne, and that his potentialities are forever departed away.  For myself, grown too indolent for an interest in aught beyond the sentimentalities of politics, I sorrow that this is so.  Indifference is ever conservative and hesitates at change; and, speaking for what is within myself and not at all perhaps for that which is best for the public, I would have preferred a continuation of the Croker dynasty.  As it is, good sooth!  Mr. Croker is destroyed.  And your ruin, of whatever character, the resort of owls, the habitat of bats, and all across it flung the melancholy ivy—­that verdant banner of victorious decay!—­is, at its loveliest, but a spectacle of depression; and one who has witnessed Mr. Croker in his vigor must be at least dimly affected as he beholds him take his sad and passive place with those who were.  Mr. Croker is not to be blamed as the architect of his overthrow.  With what lights that shone, his conduct was prudent enough; and his dethronement is to be charged to destiny—­to kismet, rather than to any gate-opening carelessness on the purblind part of himself.  ‘Prudentia fato major,’ said the Florentine.  But the Medici was wrong, and before Death bandaged his eyes for eternity it was given him to see that Destiny, for all his caution and for all his craft, had fed his hopes to defeat.  And yet, while Mr. Croker may not be charged as the reason of his own removal, some consideration of causes that incited it should have a merit and an interest.  It is one vessel crashing on a reef that points a danger, and makes for the safety of every ship that follows, and the story of a wrecked and drowned dictatorship cannot fail to instruct ambition in whatever field.

“Following the last presidential campaign, Mr. Croker sailed Englandward to repose himself from his labors.  For ten months did he rest, recuperate, restrengthen and restore himself.  And when he departed, albeit he may have had no suspicion of that fact, Mr. Croker left his chieftaincy behind.  That was to happen in the nature of things, and Mr. Croker would have foreseen it had he been a true scientist of supremacy.  Remember it, all ye kings and princes and potentates among men! a crown will never travel, a scepter cannot leave the realm, and there are no wheels on a throne.  Mr. Croker was not aware of these cardinal truths of kingcraft when he sailed away; the knowledge became his at a time too late to have a value beyond the speculative.  Mr. Croker left the garments of his leadership behind him and eighteen of the ‘leaders’ appropriated them with a plot.  They caught their chief in bathing and they stole his clothes.