It concerns another young civilian, though this one was so old that he should have known better, and relates to a time years before when I happened to be running for the state senate. I say happened, for it was precisely of that fortuitous nature, since I had not been concerned in the circumstances which nominated me, so entirely negative in their character that I might as well have been said not to be running at all. I was a young lawyer, just beginning to practice, and in my wide leisure was out of town that summer, economically spending a holiday at my father’s house, and, since the Democrats had no hope in this world of carrying the district, and could get no one who was on the ground to defend himself to accept their nomination, they had nominated me. It was an honor, perhaps, but so empty and futile that when I came home again it seemed useless even to decline it, and best to forget it, and so I tried to do that, and made no campaign at all. But one afternoon I had a caller, a tall, dark visaged man, in black clerical garb, who came softly into my office, carefully closed the door, and, fixing his strange, intense eyes on me, said that he came to talk politics. He represented a reform league and he came, he said, to discuss my candidature for the state senate, and to offer me the support of his organization. “Of course,” he went on to explain, “we should impose certain conditions.” He fixed on me again and very intently, those strange, fanatic eyes. I knew very well what the conditions were; it was hardly necessary for him to explain that I should be expected to sign a pledge to support the bills proposed by his organization, some of which, no doubt, were excellent measures. I explained to him that I was under no illusions as to the campaign, that there was no possible chance of my election that year, that if there had been I never would have been nominated, and nothing short of a miracle could elect me. “But,” I added, “even if that miracle happens, though it will not, and I should be elected, I should go down to Columbus and to the Senate able to say that I had made no promises whatever.” He looked at me a moment, with those strange, cold eyes peering narrowly out of his somber visage, and as he gazed they seemed to contract, and with the faint shadow of a smile that was wholly without humor, he said: “Well, you can say that.” “What do you mean?” I asked. The smile raised the man’s cheeks a little higher until they enclosed the little eyes in minute wrinkles, and invested them with an expression of the deepest cunning. “Why, since you are opposed to signing our pledge, we will waive that in your case, and you and I can have a little private understanding--no one need ever know, and you can say----” he was gently tapping the ends of his fingers together, and the last terms of his proposal seemed to be absorbed by an expression of vulpine significance so eloquent and plain in its meaning that mere words were superfluous.