“That's true,” said Briscoe, who had overheard her. “He'll go pretty far. A man that people know is steady and strong and level-headed can get whatever he wants, because a public man can get anything, if people know he's safe and honest and they can rely on him for _sense_. It sounds like a simple matter; but only three or four public men in the country have convinced us that they are like that. Hurry along, young people.” Crossing the street, they met Miss Tibbs; she was wiping her streaming eyes with the back of her left hand and still mechanically waving her handkerchief with her right. “Isn't it beautiful?” she said, not ceasing to flutter, unconsciously, the little square of cambric. “There was such a throng that I grew faint and had to come away. I don't mind your seeing me crying. Pretty near everybody cried when he walked up to the steps and we saw that he was lame.” Standing on the outskirts of the crowd, they could hear the mellow ring of Harkless's voice, but only fragments of the speech, for it was rather halting, and was not altogether clear in either rhetoric or delivery; and Mr. Bence could have been a good deal longer in saying what he had to say, and a thousand times more oratorical. Nevertheless, there was not a man or woman present who did not declare that it was the greatest speech ever heard in Plattville; and they really thought so--to such lengths are loyalty and friendship sometimes carried in Carlow and Amo and Gaines. He looked down upon the attentive, earnest faces and into the kindly eyes of the Hoosier country people, and, as he spoke, the thought kept recurring to him that this was the place he had dreaded to come back to; that these were the people he had wished to leave--these, who gave him everything they had to give--and this made it difficult to keep his tones steady and his throat clear. Helen stood so far from the steps (nor could she be induced to penetrate further, though they would have made way for her) that only fragments reached her, but what she heard she remembered: “I have come home... Ordinarily a man needs to fall sick by the wayside or to be set upon by thieves, in order to realize that nine-tenths of the world is Samaritan, and the other tenth only too busy or too ignorant to be. Down here he realizes it with no necessity of illness or wounds to bring it out; and if he does get hurt, you send him to Congress.... There will be no other in Washington so proud of what he stands for as I shall be. To represent you is to stand for realities--fearlessness, honor, kindness.... We are people who take what comes to us, and it comes bountifully; we are rich--oh, we are all Americans here!... This is the place for a man who likes to live where people are kind to one another, and where they have the old-fashioned way of saying 'Home.' Other places, they don't seem to get so much into it as we do. And to come home as I have to-day.... I have come home....”