which I myself was at odds.  I pictured them in a remote land, shunned by mankind.  Was there something within me that might eventually draw me to do likewise?  The desire in me to which my father had referred, which would brook no opposition, which twisted and squirmed until it found its way to its object?  I recalled the words of Jarvis, the carpenter, that if I ever set my heart on another man’s wife, God help him.  God help me!

A wicked man!  I had never beheld the handsome and fascinating Mr. Jennings, but I visualised him now; dark, like all villains, with a black moustache and snapping black eyes.  He carried a cane.  I always associated canes with villains.  Whereupon I arose, groped for the matches, lighted the gas, and gazing at myself in the mirror was a little reassured to find nothing sinister in my countenance....

Next to my father’s faith in a Moral Governor of the Universe was his belief in the Tariff and the Republican Party.  And this belief, among others, he handed on to me.  On the cinder playground of the Academy we Republicans used to wage, during campaigns, pitched battles for the Tariff.  It did not take a great deal of courage to be a Republican in our city, and I was brought up to believe that Democrats were irrational, inferior, and—­with certain exceptions like the Hollisters—­dirty beings.  There was only one degree lower, and that was to be a mugwump.  It was no wonder that the Hollisters were Democrats, for they had a queer streak in them; owing, no doubt, to the fact that old Mr. Jules Hollister’s mother had been a Frenchwoman.  He looked like a Frenchman, by the way, and always wore a skullcap.

I remember one autumn afternoon having a violent quarrel with Gene Hollister that bade fair to end in blows, when he suddenly demanded:—­“I’ll bet you anything you don’t know why you’re a Republican.”

“It’s because I’m for the Tariff,” I replied triumphantly.

But his next question floored me.  What, for example, was the Tariff?  I tried to bluster it out, but with no success.

“Do you know?” I cried finally, with sudden inspiration.

It turned out that he did not.

“Aren’t we darned idiots,” he asked, “to get fighting over something we don’t know anything about?”

That was Gene’s French blood, of course.  But his question rankled.  And how was I to know that he would have got as little satisfaction if he had hurled it into the marching ranks of those imposing torch-light processions which sometimes passed our house at night, with drums beating and fifes screaming and torches waving,—­thousands of citizens who were for the Tariff for the same reason as I:  to wit, because they were Republicans.

Yet my father lived and died in the firm belief that the United States of America was a democracy!

Resolved not to be caught a second time in such a humiliating position by a Democrat, I asked my father that night what the Tariff was.  But I was too young to understand it, he said.  I was to take his word for it that the country would go to the dogs if the Democrats got in and the Tariff were taken away.  Here, in a nutshell, though neither he nor I realized it, was the political instruction of the marching hordes.  Theirs not to reason why.  I was too young, they too ignorant.  Such is the method of Authority!