His election had been a scene of great festivity. On the third Saturday in June (on which Nigger ’Lection was always held) there gathered in the great oak grove on Rose Hill the black inhabitants, riding on saddles and pillions, in chaises and farm-wagons, in ox-carts even--men, women, and children--all in their gayest and finest attire, from all the towns around. At ten o’clock the canvass commenced. Weeks of “’lectureneerin’ and parmenteerin’” had roused great interest in the event, and at last the two rows of the male friends of the respective candidates were arranged in lines under the trees in the charge of two pompous marshals, while the women stood admiringly around. Cuddymonk, mounted on Colonel Gardiner’s gray horse, and wearing a fine coat and knee-breeches that had been given him by the colonel, with a great borrowed gold-laced cocked hat balanced on the back of his head, rode up and down the line flourishing a long sword that had been lent him for the occasion. And he kept quiet and order, that no one might change ranks after the counting began, or step from one end of the line to the other, and thus fraudulently increase the number of votes. When the counting was done the number of votes and successful candidate was announced. Cuddymonk’s election was received with tumultuous cheers and congratulations. Only one event occurred to mar the dignity of this first election. As he was about to end his inauguration address with a glorious flourish and climax of ornate rhetoric, his defeated opponent called out, in a high, malicious voice, “Cuddy, yer calfs has got round in front!” Cuddy glanced down at his legs with apprehensive mortification. Alas! it was too true. Colonel Gardiner had given with the knee-breeches a pair of his fine long stockings: but as he was as sturdy and muscular as Cuddy was thin, and as the politician had even more “negative calf and convex shin” (as said Randolph of Virginia) than have most of his race, the colonel’s stockings hung in unsightly folds; that Cuddy’s wife, Rosann, remedied by thrusting into each stocking-leg a great roll of sheep’s wool. In the heat of “parmenteerin’,” and through constant friction against his horse’s sides, Cuddy’s woollen calves had indeed “got round in front.” In vain did he try, amid the jeers of his opponents, to replace the unsightly wads in a dignified and proper position; they refused to stay placed, and for the rest of the day, at the dinner and at the dance, the false calves hung in front of and under his sharp old knees, looking for all the world, in the gray, wrinkled stockings, like a pair of hornets’ nests under the eaves of a house.