The Secretary of State, however, was disappointed in Crane. He proved to be quite as intractable as Thorndyke had been, and with less excuse--for Thorndyke had never been asked to little dinners at the Secretary’s house. The Secretary’s widowed daughter, Mrs. Hill-Smith, the beautiful, well-gowned, soft-voiced granddaughter of Cap’n Josh Slater, of Ohio River fame, murmured once or twice when Crane was under discussion that he was “so very Western,” and assumed a rather apologetic tone for having been seen at the play with him. The Secretary himself, despairing of making the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs a handy tool for the State Department, returned to his legitimate business. This business consisted of labouring and slaving, in conjunction with foreign chancelleries, to make elaborate treaties, which the House and Senate treated as college football teams treat the pigskin on hard-fought fields. The Secretary felt peculiarly aggrieved over the Brazilian affair, in which the State Department made a ridiculously small figure, in spite of innumerable letters, memoranda, protocols, treaties, and what not. When the time came for action the Congress had quietly taken the whole matter in charge, and had not even censured the Secretary if it could not praise him. Could he have been attacked and denounced, as Mr. Balfour and M. Combes and Chancellor von Buelow, and the Prime Ministers of Europe were, it would have been a consolation. But even this was cruelly denied him. He had gone through all the strenuous forms of diplomacy which meant something a hundred years ago, when there was neither cable nor telegraph, and when diplomats were not merely clerks and auditors of their respective foreign offices. The Secretary had practised all the diplomatic expedients he knew. When he had not made up his mind what to say to an ambassador, he had gone to bed with lumbago. When he wished to impress one of the great Powers of Europe with the notion that it had in him a Bismarck to deal with, he had lighted a cigar in the presence of five full-fledged ambassadors. Remembering how eagerly the world always waited for the speech of the Prime Minister of England at the annual Lord Mayor’s banquet, the Secretary had spent a whole month composing and revising his remarks at a great banquet in New York on Decoration Day, and the reporters had got his speech all wrong, and a disrespectful New York newspaper had made game of his trousers, had compared them to Uncle Josh Whitcomb’s in “The Old Homestead,” and had asked pertinently--or impertinently--where the Secretary had hired them. In Congress he fared little better. The Senate had taken some small notice of him. In the House he had been practically ignored, except once when a member alluded to having “an interview with the Secretary of State.” A member of his own party, the same Honourable Mark Antony Hudgins, of Texas, who had guyed Crane, had sternly rebuked