country the people reject Standard time and regulate their leisurely affairs by "God's time," noon was half an hour gone, and, after their dinners, they were seeking the relaxation they did not seem to need. The rain had ceased, and on the village green under the clearing sky the old men had come out to pitch horseshoes. Among them was a patriarch whose long white beard, stained with the juice of the tobacco he resolutely chewed, swept the belt of his slack trousers; he was in bare feet. The human foot after it has trod this earth for three score years and ten is not a thing of beauty, and Ashley joked me, as we labored in the mud of those deplorable roads, for my temerity in hoping that we could convert that antediluvian to our way of thinking.
Had the task been wholly mine I should not have undertaken it, and, of course, in that instance I did not attempt it; the old barefoot quoit player stood to us a symbol of the implicit and stubborn conservatism of the rural districts. But there were others in the field, an army of them, indeed; Herbert Bigelow, the radical preacher of Cincinnati, who had been president of the constitutional convention; Henry T. Hunt, Cincinnati's young mayor; and, most influential of all of them perhaps, James M. Cox, destined that autumn to be elected governor of Ohio. And, besides all these, there was the spirit of the times, penetrating at last with its inspiring ideas even the conservatism of the country people. I was confident that the old man could be counted upon to vote for the initiative and referendum at any rate, since one so free and democratic in cos-
