And yet there was beauty there, moral beauty, as there ever is somewhere in man. Out on the edge of that bedlam, standing under the gallery on the Democratic side, near the cloak-room, stood a tall, lank man. You would have known him at once, anywhere, as an Egyptian, as we called those who had come from the Illinois land south of the old O. & M. railroad. He was uncouth in appearance; he wore drab, ill-fitting clothes, and at his wrinkled throat there was no collar. He was a member, sent there from some rural district far down in the southern end of the state; and all through the session he had been silent, taking no part, except to vote, and to vote, on most occasions, with his party, which, in those days, was the whole duty of man. This night would see the end of his political career, if his brief experience in an obscure position could be called a career, and he stood there, silently looking on, plucking now and then at his chin, his long, wrinkled face brown and solemn and inscrutable. The old Egyptian stood there while the long roll was being called, and the crisis approached, and the nervous tension was a keen pain. And suddenly one of the gas lobbyists went up to him, there on the verge of the House, and began to talk with him. I had the story a good while afterwards from one of the whips, who, it seemed, knew all that had gone on that night. The lobbyist of course knew about the man, knew especially about his necessities, as lobbyists do; and he began to talk to the old fellow about them--about his poverty and his children, and he used the old argument which has been employed so long and so successfully with the rural members of all our legislatures, and has been the source of so much evil in our city governments, that is, the argument that the bill concerned only Chicago, and that the folks down home would neither know nor care how he voted on it, and then--how much two thousand dollars would mean to him. As the lobbyist talked, there were various eyes that looked at him, waiting for a sign; they needed only a few votes then, and the roll-call was being delayed by one pretense and another, and the clock on the wall, inexorably ticking toward the hour of that legislature’s dissolution, was turned back. The old fellow listened and stroked his chin, and then presently, when the lobbyist had done, he turned his old blue eyes on him and said: “I reckon you’re right: I’m poor, and I’ve got a big family. And you’re right, too, when you say my people won’t know nor care: they won’t; they don’t know nor care a damn; they won’t send me back here, of course. And God knows what’s to come of my wife and my children; I am going home to them to-morrow and on Monday I’m going to hunt me a job in the harvest-field; I reckon I’ll die in the poorhouse. Yes, I’m going home--but”--he stopped and looked the lobbyist in the eye--“I’m going home an honest man.”