“All right. I was only guessing what you had in your mind. Well--it's business sets the pace nowadays. 'Most everything else has to catch its gait or be left. I remember Champney forty years gone. He was a fine picture, when he got up and spread himself. He didn't do anything that's here now, unless it's a volume of his speeches, congressional and occasional. Not much. He kept us all whooping for Harry Clay. Well--Clay's dead, Whig Party and Compromises and all burnt up. Your father built sixty miles of canal. Canal stock's pretty dead now, but that's not his fault. He laid a few thousand miles of railroad, went around this place and that, cleaning up the country. Several million people travel his railroads and walk his bridges. Anybody ever call him a great man like Henry Champney? Gone little he cared if they did or didn't. He and his like were a sight more important. Well--no; Champney didn't ask favours of anybody in those days. And he didn't ask votes. They shovelled 'em at him, and he went on telling 'em the Constitution was the foundation of America, and Harry Clay the steeple. They weren't. Rick Hennion and his like were the foundation, and there wasn't any steeple. If you ask what they're all rowing round in the street for now, why, I don't know. I guess they've all found out the point's got to be fought out there or nowhere. Well--better think over what I was telling you, Dick. You're Rick Hennion's son. Well--it's none of my business--but--I'd gone like to see you old Champney's son-in-law--if that's it. I believed in Champney once, and shouted for Clay, and thought there was something in it. I did, that's a fact. I'd lock horns with any other bull then, and swear my name was Righteouashess and his was Sin.” “Well, but Champney----” “Yes--Champney!” “When he turned a vote, it meant he'd persuaded a man, didn't it?” “Yes--Champney! His best argument was a particular chest tone. If I tell a man, 'Hullo, Jimmy!' and give him a cigar, it's as reasonable as a chest tone.” “It's not in my line, Wood,” said Hen-nion after a silence. “What makes you so down? You're not old.” “Going on seventy, Dick.” Wood's mood seemed more than usually frank and talkative. He seemed to be smoothing out the creases in his mind, hunting into corners that he hardly knew himself, showing a certain wistfulness to explain his conception of things, complex and crumpled by the wear and pressures of a long life, possibly taking Hennion to represent some remembrance that he would like to be friends with after long estrangement, and in that way pleading with his own youth to think kindly of him. Or it might have been he was thinking of “Rick” Hennion, who helped him forty years before, and stayed with him longest of worn-out ideals. There was a rush of feet and clamour of voices in the press-room. “Wood! Wood!” “First Ward.” “Thrown out forty votes.” “Wouldn't do what you told 'em.”