It was Strong's turn now. He bent his broad back, and the loaders began to burden him. At ten they stopped, but Strong called for more. Three others were heaped upon him, and slowly he began to move away. One could see only his legs beneath his burden, which towered far above him. Ten feet beyond the farthest mark he bore the bags and let them down. The people began cheering, and many came to shake his hand and feel the sinews in his arms and shoulders. Of the trial at scale-lifting a woodsman who stood near gave this illuminating description, "When they all got through, Strong put on two hundred more an' raised his neck an' lifted, an' the bar come up like a trout after a fly." Silas Strong stood, his coat off, his trousers tucked in his boots, looking soberly at the people who cheered him. One eye was wide open, the other partly closed. There were wrinkles above his wide eye, and his faded felt hat, tilted backward and to one side, left his face uncovered. He had a new and grateful sense of being "ahead," but seemed to wonder if so much brute strength were altogether creditable. Master was to address the people, and Strong was invited to sit behind the speaker's table with the select of the county. He accompanied the president of the corporation to the platform in the park, his pack-basket on his arm. More than a thousand men and women had gathered in front of them when the chairman introduced the young orator. The speech delighted Silas Strong, and he summed it up in his old memorandum-book as follows: _"folks cant be no better than the air they brethe "roots of a plant are in the ground but the roots of a man are in his lungs_ _"whair the woods ar plenty the air is strong an folks are stout an supple like our forefathers when they licked the British them days they got a powrful crop of folks sometimes fifteen in a famly the powr of the woods was in em. now folks live under a sky eight feet above their heads an take their air secont handed an drink at the bar instead of the spring an eat more than what they earn an travel on wheels an think so much of their own helth they aint got no time to think of their countrys when a man's mind is on his stummick it cant be any where else brains warnt made to digest vittles with old fashioned ways is best which Strong says is so also that a man had not oughto eat any more than what he's earnt by hard labor."_ After the address Strong went home to dinner with Congressman Wilbert, the leading citizen of Hillsborough. That little town still retained the democratic spirit of old times. There one had only to be clean and honest to be respectable, and the mighty often sat at meat with the lowly. Strong declined the invitation at first, on the plea that he had fried cakes in his pack-basket, and yielded only after some urging.