This was Jamie's busiest time. Everybody would have bills to introduce or petitions from his constituents to present, and for an hour Jamie would be scampering up and down the aisles between the members' desks and the clerk's desk. But after that he had a breathing spell, and could sit on the speaker's steps and whisper to the speaker's page, or look about over the house and watch the members. There were grave members from the country districts with long whiskers and steel-bowed spectacles, there were city members with fancy vests and diamonds, there were Irish members and German members, there was a Polish member named Kumaszynski, and there was a negro member, who sat away back on the Republican side almost under the galleries, and was very quiet, and wore black clothes and gold eye-glasses.
But there was one whom Jamie liked above all the others. He was tall, with smiling blue eyes that saw everything, and though his black hair was patched with gray at the temples, his face was that of a young man, clean-shaven and ruddy. He was a Chicago member and the most fashionably dressed man in the house—he wore a different suit of clothes
