In those days I had not met him. I might have called at his office, to be sure, but I did not care to add to his burdens. One day, suddenly, as I was working on a story in my office, in he stepped with a startling, abrupt manner, wheeled a chair up to my desk, and sat down. He was a big Welshman with a sandy complexion and great hands that had worked hard in their time, and he had an eye that looked right into the center of your skull. He wore, and all the time he was in the room continued to wear, a large cream-colored slouch hat, and he had on the flowing cravat which for some inexplicable reason artists and social reformers wear; their affinity being due, no doubt, to the fact that the reformer must be an artist of a sort, else he could not dream his dreams. I was relieved, however, to find that Jones wore his hair clipped short, and there was still about him that practical air of the very practical business man he had been before he became mayor. He had been such a practical business man that he was worth half a million, a fairly good fortune for our town; but he had not been in office very long before all the business men were down on him, and saying that what the town needed was a business man for mayor, a statement that was destined to ring in my ears for a good many years. They disliked him of course because he would not do just what they told him to,--that being the meaning and purpose of a business man for mayor,--but insisted that there were certain other people in the city who were entitled to some of his service and consideration--namely, the working people and the poor. The politicians and the preachers objected to him on the same grounds: the unpardonable sin being to express in any but a purely ideal and sentimental form sympathy for the workers or the poor. It seemed to be particularly exasperating that he was doing all this in the name of the Golden Rule, which was for the Sunday-school; and they even went so far as to bring to town another Sam Jones, the Reverend Sam Jones, to conduct a “revival” and to defeat the Honorable Sam Jones. The Reverend Sam Jones had big meetings, and said many clever things, and many true ones, the truest among them being his epigram, “I am for the Golden Rule myself, up to a certain point, and then I want to take the shotgun and the club.” I think that expression marked the difference between him and our Sam Jones, in whose philosophy there was no place at all for the shotgun or the club. The preachers were complaining that Mayor Jones was not using shotguns, or at least clubs, on the “bad” people in the town; I suppose that since their own persuasions had in a measure failed, they felt that the Mayor with such instruments might have made the “bad” people look as if they had been converted anyway.