The one excitement of Tyre too--far transcending the county fair, which had only interested them casually, and which they had seen moved over to Sidon, on the line of the newly-extended railroad, without a protest--was a political convention. There would be such a crowd about the Court House then as scarcely the spectacle of its being consumed by flames could draw at another time. The freeholders of Tyre paid much more than their fair share of county taxes; they knew it, and did not grumble at the injustice. In fact it rather pleased them than otherwise to see their town rated on the Supervisor’s assessment-rolls according to its ancient wealth; the amercement was a testimonial to their dignity. Upstart towns like Sidon might wrangle over a few hundred dollars, and cheapen their valuation in the public eye by unworthy tricks; Tyre would have none of such small doings; it would preserve a genteel exterior, even if it had to eat pork grease on its buckwheat cakes in domestic seclusion. But if there had been so much as a hint about holding a county convention anywhere else than in the Tyre Court House--then, to use Abe Beekman’s homely expression, you would have seen the fur fly! Other towns might indulge their modern and mercenary tastes in county fairs, railroads, gas, reservoirs and the like, to their hearts’ content, but they must keep their hands off political conventions. He would be a brazen Jayhawker indeed who should question Tyre’s monopoly of these! So new generations of county politicians followed precedent without thought of murmuring, and accepted the discomforts of jolting in crowded democrat-wagons over the stony, bleak hills to Tyre, of eating cold, bad dinners in the smoke-dried, draughty barracks which had once been hotels, of drinking limed well-water with the unspeakable whiskey--as natural consequences of being interested in the public affairs of the nation. This resignation of other Jay County towns to the convention claims of Tyre swelled into a spirit of truculent defence every two years, when the question of a joint Congressional gathering for all three counties of the district came up. Precisely what would have happened if the bigger shires of Dearborn and Adams had combined in a refusal to come to Tyre, I am not bold enough to guess. The general feeling would probably have been that a crisis had arisen in which Jay County could do no less than dissolve her relations with the Federal Union.