more genial suggestion than the pallid keener clustered scintillations of the chimeras of the skies. The gilded cross of the cathedral held aloft over the city was sublimated in the moonbeams and the fair nocturnal influences; it was mystic, effulgent, seeming to radiate light like the consecrated sign in a vision. He did not feel the cold; he stood for a long time, with his hands in his pockets, his overcoat falling back on his shoulders, watching with his restless eyes the quiet snowy town suffused with dreamy yellow light and pervaded by long, pensive shadows. Suddenly he turned and went within. The House of Representatives presented a spectacle not altogether unprecedented in his experience. A spirited debate was in progress. Sixteen men were trying to speak at once. The seventeenth earnest orator was forcibly held in his chair by his friends. The speaker’s gavel sounded continuously, but produced little effect upon the incoherency of the discussion. Other members were talking in low tones of alien matters; one had fallen asleep. His snores might have been generally noticed but for the commotion. Kinsard glanced at him as he took his seat close by. “That’s the best oratorical effort I ever heard McKimmon make,” he said to a friend. “Observe how he sticks to the point: iterative, it is true; tautology might be urged against it as mere diction; but I admire its simplicity, its comprehensibility, its continuity. There are no digressions; nothing is done for effect; plain, cogent, impressive. It is a fine display of natural eloquence.” His colleague burst out laughing, and Kinsard looked at him in apparent surprise, lifting his straight black eyebrows a little. Then he asked if the bill to remove the county seat of Kildeer County had yet been reached. “No,” said his friend, “but Harshaw has been around here after you three or four times.” The speaker’s gavel had succeeded in securing order, and now the sixteen men’s statements and counter-statements were elicited in decorous routine. The sudden cessation of noise roused Mr. McKimmon, whose somnolency ended in a snort and a conviction that he had not closed his eyes. He perceived a suspicion to the contrary in the minds of his nearest neighbors, and he could not account for it. After the House had voted upon the question of public policy which had so agitated it, various minor bills were taken up, and there was a good deal of quiet movement, groups of two or three colloguing together here and there, and Harshaw came up again to talk to Kinsard. “I want to know whether you’ll coöperate with us against the bill for moving the county seat of Kildeer County.” He stood leaning one arm upon Kinsard’s desk; the other was akimbo. He knitted his brow meditatively, and pursed up his red lips, and looked not at Kinsard, but at his inkstand. He had not altogether recovered from the rebuff so publicly given in the hotel corridor.