We have to sing the song of sixpence for the last time in these pages; and as it is an old song now, there will be no encores.  If you can buy one member of the lower house for ten dollars, how many members can you buy for fifty?  It was no such problem in primary arithmetic that Mr. Balch and his associates had to solve—­theirs was in higher mathematics, in permutations and combinations, and in least squares.  No wonder the old campaigners speak with tears in their eyes of the days of that ever memorable summer.  There were spoils to be picked up in the very streets richer than the sack of the thirty cities; and as the session wore on it is affirmed by men still living that money rained down in the Capitol Park and elsewhere like manna from the skies, if you were one of a chosen band.  If you were, all you had to do was to look in your vest pockets when you took your clothes off in the evening and extract enough legal tender to pay your bill at the Pelican for a week.  Mr. Lovejoy having been overheard one day to make a remark concerning the diet of hogs, the next morning certain visitors to the capital were horrified to discover trails of corn leading from the Pelican House to their doorways.  Men who had never seen a receiving teller opened bank accounts.  No, it was not a problem in simple arithmetic, and Mr. Balch and Mr. Flint, and even Mr. Duncan and Mr. Worthington, covered whole sheets with figures during the stifling days in July.  Some men are so valuable that they can be bought twice, or even three times, and they make figuring complicated.

Jethro Bass did no calculating.  He sat behind the curtains, and he must have kept the figures in his head.

The battle had closed in earnest, and for twelve long, sultry weeks it raged with unabated fierceness.  Consolidation had a terror for the rural mind, and the state Tribune skilfully played its stream upon the constituents of those gentlemen who stood tamely at the Worthington hitching-posts, and the constituents flocked to the capital; that able newspaper, too, found space to return, with interest, the attacks of Mr. Worthington’s organ, the Newcastle Guardian.  These amenities are much too personal to reproduce here, now that the smoke of battle has rolled away.  An epic could be written upon the conflict, if there were space:  Canto One, the first position carried triumphantly, though at some expense, by the Worthington forces, who elect the Speaker.  That had been a crucial time before the town meetings, when Jethro abdicated.  The Worthington Speaker goes ahead with his committees, and it is needless to say that Mr. Chauncey Weed is not made Chairman of the Committee on Corporations.  As an offset to this, the Jethro forces gain on the extreme right, where the Honorable Peleg Hartington is made President of the Senate, etc.