face assumed a peculiar expression of solemnity which made him look like a deacon handing around the church plate—"I lay to the fact that I never could make a speech in my life, and I found it out at an early stage in my career. I'm a Presbyterian, as you know, but in my town I'm classed as a heretic and an iconoclast, because when they want to call a new preacher and to have him preach a specimen sermon I always tell the elders, 'Why do you want to judge the fellow by the way he talks? It's the poorest test in the world to apply to a man. Find out what he can do.' But they won't listen to me, of course, and the Fourth Presbyterian Church is perennially filled by a human wind-bag, who snorts and puffs and blows dust about until the congregation get tired of him and try another wind-bag. In Congress wind-bags don't last."
"All the same, I wish from the bottom of my heart that I had had Crane's chance yesterday and had used it as well," replied Thorndyke.
"If you had you would have given our junior Senator a bad quarter of an hour," replied Senator Standiford, gravely.
Now, in common with all true Senatorial bosses,
