The old court house in Grand Prairie, its mighty blocks of sandstone evenly browned by the justice and equity of the rain and wind, lifted its Doric columns in the sunshine of a June morning. Under the cornice of its pediment the sparrows were scuffling, and in the elms that grew about, clipping their boughs in a stately way to the breeze, blue jays were chattering, while the tame squirrels, the legal pets of the county supervisors, gamboled impudently on the grass and on the graveled walks. Around the four sides of the square the raw brick buildings stood baking in the sun, and at the long hitching racks, gnawed during years of cribbing, horses were stamping and switching at the flies. On any other Monday morning the racks would have been empty, but this day the court house's weather-beaten floors, fluttering with old notices of sheriff's sales, were swung wide, and through them sauntered lawyers and jurymen and those who could quit the pleasant benches in the yard outside for the mild excitement of the June term of the Circuit Court that day to be begun and holden. As Jerome B. Garwood, walking with the easy and dignified tread that befits a congressman, came down Sangamon Avenue and saw once more the familiar square, he experienced a revulsion of sentiment, a sense almost of despair, to think that he was back again in the sleepy little prairie town. All the way from Washington he had looked forward to being at home again. He had thought how good it would be to see Emily once more, and the little six months old baby whose inspired messages of love had filled all her letters to him; he had thought he would enjoy the quiet of his old law office, and the shade and repose of the town, which, as visitors in Grand Prairie were told when they happened down in the winter or spring or fall or late summer, was always at its best in June. Something of this anticipation had been realized Saturday night when he had reached home and hugged the boy in his arms again, but the quiet of one Sunday, and, more especially, the dolor of one old-fashioned Sunday evening had dispelled all his pleasure, and this morning, when he turned into the ugly square, the whole of what life in Grand Prairie really was, seemed to rise before him and roll over him in a great wave of discontent.