With this explanation for my taking our “Sam” instead of you other boys for quotation, maybe _mutilation_, just here in the context of this book, I may add that his article in the Saturday Evening Post of date, April 15, 1911, is before me. It so _fits_ the point I am now considering--whether Postmaster General Hitchcock was “influenced” or “influencing”--that I am going to quote, and, possibly, take all sorts of liberties with Mr. Blythe’s splendid presentation of Mr. Hitchcock’s attitude, action and _animus_. Mr. Blythe, in his article in the Saturday Evening Post, (published by the Curtis Publishing Company, Philadelphia, and, by the way, one of the most educative weekly periodicals the world has ever known), tells us something of Postmaster General Hitchcock’s procedure since in office. I am here going to appropriate some of the information furnished in Mr. Blythe’s article. Whether I use quotation marks or not, I want the reader to know that Samuel G. Blythe has “wised me up a heap” regarding our Postmaster General’s peculiar official gyrations since the latter arrived on his present job. First, it would appear that Mr. Hitchcock arrived with the “deficit” in his brain. I mean, of course, the Postoffice Department deficit was _on_ his mind, and being fresh from that state of splendid attainments and beans--Massachusetts--Mr. Hitchcock came to his job brimful of nerve, purpose and postal service deficits. He was determined to do things, especially to that _deficit_. Well, he has been doing things, but scarcely in a way that one would expect from a man coming from the people who grow up there. The writer cannot say whether or not Mr. Hitchcock “growed up there.” If he did, some cog must have slipped or “jammed” in his raising. Most born Plymouth rock men whom I have met, and I have had the pleasure of meeting many, start out, _and live_, on life lines which clearly and _cleanly_ recognize the fact that _the end is on its way_, and that they are going to meet it--meet it with a brave, honest face and a moral courage that will answer “Here” at the final round-up. I presume, however, there are a few Easterners who grow haughty, supercilious and dictatorial in proportion to the square of the distance they are removed (by fortuitous circumstance, political preferment or other means), from the “down-row” in the fall husking, the spring plowing, the free lunch and other symptoms of human industry or need. This is wholly an “aside.” How it may apply to Mr. Hitchcock must be left to readers who have a more intimate personal acquaintance with him than have I.