"Anything wrong, Jim?" inquired the sympathetic bartender. "Just a little blue to-night, Jack, that's all." "Sometimes I get into those spells myself. Hell, ain't they?" Jim nodded. "I suppose they come from nervousness." The bartender nodded back. "Or liver," said he, setting out the red bottle. "Have a smile." "No, I don't want any more of that damned stuff. A man's a fool to let it get away with him, and sometimes I figure I better watch out--not but what I can't control myself, y'understand." There was the slightest interrogation in his tone. "Sure y'can, Jim; I know that. Still," dubiously, "like you say, a fellow ought to watch out. It'll land the K.O. on the stoutest lad in shoes, if he keeps a-fightin' it." "It's for use and not abuse. Ain't I right?" The bartender conspicuously helped himself to a swallow of lithia. "Yep, sure," he said. "D'you know, Jim, I'm kind of sorry you didn't go home to supper to-night." "So'm I, but I got to talking----" "Why don't you go now?" "Too blue, Jack, and home is fierce when I get there with a breath." "Remember the time the little woman come here after you?" "Oh, it's no use bringing that up now," said Jim sadly. "She liked me then. Give me a ginger ale." Jim took his glass and sat alone at a round table by the wall, under the painting of Pasiphae and The Shower of Gold. This saloon, like many others, in Chicago, ran to classical subjects. Jim relit his cigar and slowly turned the pages of a Fliegende Blätter, looking at the pictures and habitually picking out those letters in the text which resembled English letters. It was a frayed copy which had inhabited the saloon for many months, and showed it. Jim had thumbed it twenty times before, but he was doing it again to appease his subconsciousness, to give himself the appearance of activity of some sort. But he was looking through the German pages to the years behind him. Politics--maybe that was the trouble. Politicians, at least little fellows like him, got more feathers than chicken out of it. If he hadn't quit that job with the railroad--but no, they were drivers, and there was no future in the railroad business for a fellow like him, a bookkeeper. He might have stayed there all his life and not thirty men in the entire offices have been the wiser, or have ever heard of him. In fact, he had bettered himself by going with the publishing firm. He seemed to have prospects there. It wasn't his fault they blew up and he was out on the street again. That was how he got into politics--sort of drifted in after meeting the big fellow canvassing the saloons one night, when he, Jim, had nothing else to do. The big fellow was so attractive, so sure of himself, and Jim would have seemed a fool if he had refused the offer to clerk in an election precinct that fall. There was a little money in it, and a little importance.