for Canadian traffic, and also to cut into the profits of the “Northwestern,” Mr. Lovejoy’s road.  In brief, the Truro Railroad found itself very advantageously placed, as Mr. Worthington and Mr. Flint had foreseen.  There followed a period of bickering and recrimination, of attempts of the other two railroads to secure representation in the Truro directorate, of suits and injunctions and appeals to the Legislature and I know not what else—­in all of which affairs Mr. Bijah Bixby and other gentlemen we could name found both pleasure and remuneration.

Oh, that those halcyon days of the little wars would come again, when a captain could ride out almost any time at the held of his band of mercenaries and see honest fighting and divide honest spoils!  There was much knocking about of men and horses, but very little bloodshed, so we are told.  Mr. Bixby will sit on the sunny side of his barns in Clovelly and tell you stories of that golden period with tears in his eyes, when he went to conventions with a pocketful of proxies from the river towns, and controlled in the greatest legislative year of all a “block” which included the President of the Senate, for which he got the fabulous sum of——.  He will tell you, but I won’t.  Mr. Bixby’s occupation is gone now.  We have changed all that, and we are ruled from imperial Rome.  If you don’t do right, they cut off your (political) head, and it is of no use to run away, because there is no one to run to.

It was Isaac D. Worthington—­or shall we say Mr. Flint?—­who was responsible for this pernicious change for the worse, who conceived the notion of leasing for the Truro the Central and the Northwestern,—­thus making one railroad out of the three.  If such a gigantic undertaking could be got through, Mr. Worthington very rightly deemed that the other railroads of the state would eventually fall like ripe fruit into their caps—­owning the ground under the tree, as they would.  A movement, which we need not go unto, was first made upon the courts, and for a while adverse decisions came down like summer rain.  A genius by the name of Jethro Bass had for many years presided (in the room of the governor and council at the State House) at the political birth of justices of the Supreme Court.  None of them actually wore livery, but we have seen one of them—­along time ago—­in a horse blanket.  None of them were favorable to the plans of Mr. Worthington and Mr. Duncan.

We have listened to the firing on the skirmish lines for a long time, and now the real battle is at hand.  It is June, and the Legislature is meeting, and Bijah Bixby has come down to the capital at the head of his regiment of mercenaries, of which Mr. Sutton is the honorary colonel; the clans are here from the north, well quartered and well fed; the Throne Room, within the sacred precincts of which we have been before, is occupied.  But there is another headquarters now, too, in the Pelican House—­a Railroad Room; larger than the Throne Room, with a bath-room leading out of it.  Another old friend of ours, Judge Abner Parkinson of Harwich, he who gave the sardonic laugh when Sam Price applied for the post of road agent, may often be seen in that Railroad Room from now on.  The fact is that the judge is about to become famous far beyond the confines of Harwich; for he, and none other, is the author of the Consolidation Bill itself.