It was due doubtless to the traditions of these visits, when Judge Gould, the hero of the great Biggs murder case, would be at the Nedahma House, and Senator Yates, who unravelled and dragged to the pitiless light the masonic plot to blow up Mount Vernon, was to be found at the turnpike tavern, and both would keep pretty well in-doors toward evening because Colonel De Lancey, who had shot four men before Hamilton’s death discredited duelling, was in town on private business--it was no doubt due to these memories that Tyre kept up its political tastes and, in a faded way, its political prestige, long after its material importance and interest had vanished. The mills were remembered now only by the widened reaches in the stream where their dams had once been; the starch factory was a dismantled ruin, from which what woodwork the lightning had spared had long since been abstracted for fuel; one of the taverns was now a private dwelling, and the other two neither profited themselves nor pleased the wives of the village by their dependence upon local custom. But the men of Tyre were still intense politicians. Indeed their known virulence had given to their county sobriquet of Jayhawker an almost national fame. Nowhere else in the State, proportionately, were so many weekly partisan papers taken--not tame, dispassionate prints, but the fire-eaters of both party presses, with incessant harrowing accounts of peaceful and confiding negroes being massacred in the South, on the one side, answered regularly on the other by long imposing tables of the money stolen by notorious criminals in the public service. This was the meat Tyre fed on, and contending editors could not serve it out too rank or highly peppered for its taste.