unnecessary, and innocent things which require much nervous energy and lung-power. The Senator himself gave no indications of ill-health and fatigue. In Washington he led a life as regular and temperate as that of a boarding-school miss, but when local elections were impending, or a national convention was on hand, Thorndyke had known the old gentleman to go for a fortnight at a time almost without eating or sleeping, and then come out looking as fresh as a daisy. So Thorndyke was a little sceptical about his boss’s possible retirement from the field, and took it that the Senator had been trying some sort of an intellectual bunco game upon him. When the adjournment of Congress was reached, Thorndyke took the first train to his northern home. It was a comfortable old place, on the skirts of an old colonial town left high and dry among more progressive places; but shady, serene, and comfortable in the extreme. Here, in the house where he and his father and his grandfather and great-grandfather were born, Thorndyke’s summers were spent with his sister Elizabeth, a gentle, sweet-faced creature, who had not walked for many years, but whose mind and hands were busy doing such good as lay in their reach. Down in the town before a wooden one-story office with a porch, hung a battered tin sign, which had been repaired and repainted twenty times since first, in Geoffrey Thorndyke’s grandfather’s time, it had borne the legend, “Geoffrey Thorndyke, Counsellor at Law.” Thorndyke still kept the dingy little office which had been his grandfather’s and his father’s before him. He had given up the best of his law practice at the time that he had been thrown down and securely roped for Congress by Senator Standiford and his trusty cowboys, the State Committeemen, but had always clung to the old law-office as a refuge in case Senator Standiford should relegate him to private life. Although he had been compelled to abandon the active and continuous practice of his profession--for according to the old axiom, “The law is a jealous mistress”--Thorndyke remained a student of law. He was by nature and training a very considerable lawyer, and his legal acquirements had helped to win for him the high and steady position he held in the House of Representatives. He was not a leader of men, but rather a thinker and adviser, and was proud of the somewhat scornful appellation of “the scholar in politics.” In his quiet summer home, among his few shabby books--which, unlike Mr. James Brentwood Baldwin, he read diligently, and never thought to mention that he lived among them--Thorndyke spent his placid summers. He read much, and observed a great deal. He was close to the border of Crane’s State, and their congressional districts were contiguous, and naturally Thorndyke knew the political happenings across the border.