General Stager, red and drenched with perspiration, advanced to shake the hand of the presidential candidate, and the spectacle set the crowd yelling again. The candidate began his speech immediately. It was the same speech he had delivered all along his itinerary, though his allusions to the splendid agricultural community in which he found himself, the good crops that had been yielded to the hand of the husbandman, gave a fictitious local color, and his touching reference to his old friend, General Bancroft, by whose side he had sat at Washington through so many stirring years fraught with deeds and occasions of such vast import to the national life, and his glowing tribute to the Bloody Ninety-third, brought the applause rolling up to him in great waves. He spoke for nearly an hour, standing at the railing with the big flag hanging down before him and a big, white water pitcher standing close beside; behind him were the vice-presidents sitting with studied gravity; near by, the reporters writing hurriedly; before him and around him, under the green and motionless trees, a vast multitude, heads many of them bared, faces upturned, with brows knit to aid in concentration, jaws working as they chewed on their eternal tobacco. Out at the edges of the crowd, a continual movement shifted the masses and groups of men, along the curb were lines of wagons, with horses stamping and switching their tails, across the street on the three-storied brick blocks, the flutter of flags and bunting. The old court house, frowning somehow with the majesty of the law, formed a stately, solemn background for it all; overhead was the sky, piling rapidly now with clouds. The whole square gave an effect of strange stillness, even with the voice of the speaker ringing through it; the crowd was silent, treasuring his words for future repetition, treasuring perhaps the sight of him, the sensation of being in his actual presence, for the tale of future years. But suddenly, in a second, when the crowd was held in the magic spell of his oratory, when men were least thinking of such a thing, he ceased to talk, the speech was over, the event was closed, and the great man, not pausing even long enough to let the vice-presidents of the meeting shake hands with him, or to hear the Lincoln Glee Club sing a campaign song, looked about for the colonel, climbed out of the stand into his carriage and was whirled away, lifting his hat, still with that distinguished air, amid cheers that would not let the campaign song begin, and with little boys swarming like outrunners at his glistening wheels.