He was a tall, ugly old man with chin-whiskers, but his appearance was redeemed by the power which spoke from his strongly marked face, and by his punctilious, old-fashioned dress and extreme neatness. He wore a silk hat made from a block he had used for thirty years. His coat, gray and wide-skirted, seemed of the same vintage, and his spotless collar of antique pattern, and his large black silk necktie might have been worn by Daniel Webster himself. A big pair of gold spectacles and a gold-headed cane completed a costume which was admirably harmonious, and produced the effect of an old lady in 1903 with the side curls and cap of 1853. The Senator had a newspaper spread out before him, but as Thorndyke approached folded it up, pushed his gold spectacles up on his forehead, and called out: “Hello! Have you read about the ‘Wondrous Boy’ this morning?” “I have,” replied Thorndyke, smiling pleasantly as he lifted his hat, and in response to a silent invitation he seated himself on the bench by Standiford’s side. “Great speech, that,” continued the Senator. “At first I was disposed to give you the credit for all of it--but there’s something in that fellow Crane. You couldn’t have coached him so well if he hadn’t been capable of learning.” “You do me too much honour,” replied Thorndyke, laughing, but with something like bitterness. Senator Standiford continued with a dry contortion of the lips which was meant for a smile: “But you’ll see, my son, that your friend Crane won’t grow quite so fast as he thinks he will. In our times public men require the seasoning of experience before they amount to anything. There’ll be no more Henry Clays elected to the House of Representatives before they are thirty. The world was young, then, but we have matured rapidly. It is true that we have relaxed the rule of the Senate a little, and allow the new senators to speak in the Senate Chamber at a much earlier period in their senatorial service than formerly. But speech-making is a dangerous pastime. Much of the small success I have achieved”--here Senator Standiford’s 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.”