Crane was in nowise disappointed at the sensation his published letter made. The justice of his position was at once apparent. But it was equally apparent that he was making a serious break in the political dykes which held the party together in his State against the ocean of the party opposed to it. Under Senator Bicknell’s rule, insubordination had gradually crept in. The late landslide, which had elected a Congress in opposition to the party in power, increased the importance of States like Crane’s, where the balance of power shifted about every ten years between the two parties. Senator Bicknell, in the seclusion of his boudoir--for such was his luxurious den in reality--tore his hair and used all of the expletives permissible in polite society. In a week or two Governor Sanders, without any further newspaper controversy, appointed to the vacant senatorship Mr. Michael Patrick Mulligan, a gentleman of Hibernian descent, who had made a vast fortune out of manufacturing pies by the wholesale, and who cherished an honourable ambition to legislate for the hated Saxon. Senator Bicknell, Crane, and everybody in the State knew of Mr. Michael Patrick Mulligan, who was commonly called Mince Pie Mulligan. He was a ward politician of the sort peculiarly unhampered by prejudices or principles, and who bought and sold votes by wholesale, very much as he bought and sold pies. He was totally without education, but by no means without brains, and proposed to himself a seat in the Senate as an agreeable diversion, without the least idea of doing anything beyond voting as directed by “the boss”--for so he designated the Senator who was chairman of the National Committee of Mr. Mulligan’s party. It was, on the whole, about as harmless an appointment as could be made. Mulligan’s private life was perfectly clean, and he was known to have an open hand for charity, and never to have forgotten a friend. It gave both Senator Bicknell and Crane a breathing-spell, and they were willing enough to put up with Mince Pie Mulligan until the first of January.