He stood there a moment and looked about him undecided, while Mr. Phelps with sympathetic concern displayed great willingness to serve, but was as helpless as his chief. The American sovereigns who were loafing by the station shed looked on with the reticent detachment which characterizes the rural American. And then the train slowly pulled out and left us, and Mr. Blaine cast at it a glance of longing and of reproach, as though in its sundering of the last tie with the world of comfort, he had suffered the final indignity. There seemed to be no course other than to take the ’bus, when suddenly a committee rushed up, out of breath and out of countenance, and with a chorus of apologies explained that they had met the wrong train, or gone to another station, and so bore the premier off in triumph to dine at some rich man’s house. The day seemed to grow worse as it progressed, as days ill begun have a way of doing, and when the premier in the afternoon appeared at the meeting he was to address, his spirits had not improved, and even if they had, the meeting was one to depress the spirits of any man. It assembled in a barren hall, a kind of skating rink, or something of the sort, that would have served better for a boxing match. The audience was small, and standing about in the mud and slush they had “tramped in,” to use our midwestern phrase, they displayed that bucolic indifference which can daunt the most exuberant speaker. It was in no way worthy of the man, and Mr. Blaine spoke with evident difficulty, and so wholly lacked spirit and enthusiasm that it was impossible for him to warm up to his subject. The speech was of that perfunctory sort which such an atmosphere compels, one of those speeches the speaker drags out, a word at a time, and is glad to be done with, and Mr. Blaine bore with his fates a little while, and then almost abruptly closed. He spoke on the tariff issue, and in defense of the McKinley Bill, and in marshaling the evidences of our glory and prosperity, all of which he attributed to the direct influence of the protective tariff system, he mentioned the number of miles of railroad that had been built, and even the increase in the nation’s population! The speech and the occasion afforded an opportunity to a newspaper of the opposition, which in those days of silly partizanship, was not to be overlooked. I went back to the little hotel and wrote my story, and since I had all the while in my mind not only partizan advantage, but the smiles that would break out on the countenances of Charlie Seymour and Peter Dunne and the other boys gathered in the Whitechapel Club I did not minimise the effect of all those babies who had come to life as a result of the protective tariff, nor all those ironical difficulties the day had heaped upon the great man. It was not, perhaps, quite fair, nor quite nice, but it was as fair and as nice as newspaper ethics and political etiquette--if there are such things--require, and Mr.