That seismograph of the Honourable Hilary’s persisted in tracing only a slightly ragged line throughout the beautiful month of May, in which favourable season the campaign of the Honourable Adam B. Hunt took root and flourished—­apparently from the seed planted by the State Tribune.  The ground, as usual, had been carefully prepared, and trained gardeners raked, and watered, and weeded the patch.  It had been decreed and countersigned that the Honourable Adam B. Hunt was the flower that was to grow this year.

There must be something vitally wrong with an instrument which failed to register the great earthquake shock of June the seventh!

Now that we have come to the point where this shock is to be recorded on these pages, we begin to doubt whether our own pen will be able adequately to register it, and whether the sheet is long enough and broad enough upon which to portray the relative importance of the disturbance created.  The trouble is, that there is nothing to measure it by.  What other event in the history of the State produced the vexation of spirit, the anger, the tears, the profanity; the derision, the laughter of fools, the contempt; the hope, the glee, the prayers, the awe, the dumb amazement at the superb courage of this act?  No, for a just comparison we shall have to reach back to history and fable:  David and Goliath; Theseus and the Minotaur; or, better still, Cadmus and the Dragon!  It was Cadmus (if we remember rightly) who wasted no time whatever, but actually jumped down the dragon’s throat and cut him up from the inside!  And it was Cadmus, likewise, who afterwards sowed the dragon’s teeth.

That wondrous clear and fresh summer morning of June the seventh will not be forgotten for many years.  The trees were in their early leaf in Ripton Square, and the dark pine patches on Sawanec looked (from Austen’s little office) like cloud shadows against the shimmer of the tender green.  He sat at his table, which was covered with open law-books and papers, but his eyes were on the distant mountain, and every scent-laden breeze wafted in at his open window seemed the bearer of a tremulous, wistful, yet imperious message—­“Come!” Throughout the changing seasons Sawanec called to him in words of love:  sometimes her face was hidden by cloud and fog and yet he heard her voice!  Sometimes her perfume as to-day—­made him dream; sometimes, when the western heavens were flooded with the golden light of the infinite, she veiled herself in magic purple, when to gaze at her was an exquisite agony, and she became as one forbidden to man.  Though his soul cried out to her across the spaces, she was not for him.  She was not for him!