were brought up at the verge of despair.  To make the situation even more difficult, St. John himself was prostrated with the gout, so that his telling oratory and commanding personality could not be brought to bear.  Margaret was never far from her father’s side, and she worked like a dog for him, writing to dictation till her hands became almost useless, and when the spasms of pain were great, leaving her work to kiss his old brow.

It was at this time that people all over the State began to take up a song with an inimitably catching tune.  The words of this song held up Mr. Bispham in so shrewdly true and farcically humorous a light that even his own star began to titter and threatened to slip from its high place in the heavens.  The song fell so absolutely on the head of the nail that Mr. Bispham, when he heard it for the first time, was convulsed with anger and talked of horse-whips.  The second time he heard it, he drew himself up with dignity and pretended not to notice, and the third time he broke into a cold sweat, for he began to be afraid of those words and that tune.  At a mass-meeting, while in the midst of a voluble harangue, somebody in the back of the hall punctuated—­an absurd statement, which otherwise might have passed unnoticed, by whistling the first bar of the song.  Mr. Bispham faced the tittering like a man, and endeavored to rehabilitate himself.  But his hands had slipped on the handle of the audience, and the forensic rosin of Demosthenes would not have enabled him to regain his grip.  He was cruelly assured of the fact by the hostile and ready-witted whistler.  Again Mr. Bispham absurded.  This time the tune broke out in all parts of the hall and was itself punctuated by catcalls and sotto-voce insults delivered with terrific shouts.  Mr. Bispham’s speech was hurriedly finished, and the peroration came down as flat as a skater who tries a grape-vine for the first time.  He left the hall hurriedly, pale and nervous.  The tune followed him down the street and haunted him to his room.  The alarming takingness of it had gotten in at his ear, and as he was savagely undressing he caught himself in the traitorous act of humming it to himself.

Among others to leave the hall was a tall, slim young man with freckles across the bridge of his nose and very bright blue eyes.  A party of young men accompanied him, and all were a little noisy, and, as they made the street, broke lustily into the campaign song.  People said, “That’s him,” “That’s O’Brien,” “That’s Aladdin O’Brien,” “That’s the man wrote it,” and the like.  The young men disappeared down the street singing at the tops of their voices, with interlardations of turbulent, mocking laughter.

Aladdin’s song went all over the North, and his name became known in the land.