“As for me,” continued Baldwin, “I never spoke to him, and never knew any one who did. The speaker himself only addressed him--and then as the gentleman from Greene--when they were verifying roll-calls. No one ever knew where he boarded. The herd book gave him a paragraph, saying that he had been born in Indiana along in ’37, and moved to this state sometime in the fifties. Left an orphan early, with no education, he had been a day laborer all his life, working at anything he could get, mostly on farms. He never had held office before, and none knew how he broke into the legislature--the tidal wave, I suppose. Every one knew he never would come back again. “Well, we got down to the last night of the session. The hands of the clock had been turned back in that vain old attempt to stay the remorseless hours, but its pale and impassive face was impotent as a gravestone to stay dissolution and oblivion. I know men who would have spent a fortune to give that legislature one day more of life, but it was sweeping on to its midnight death. Somehow, whenever I think of the legislature, I think of _that_ legislature, and whenever my mind conceives the state house it isn’t pictured to me as standing there on the hill, stately in the sunshine, but as it appeared that night as I walked over from the Leland, with the clouds flying low over its dome. The lower floors were dark and still as sepulchres, and the messenger boys who came over from the Western Union, now and then, reminded me of ghosts as they went by, their heels dragging on the marble floors of the corridor. A light was burning in the governor’s office, though the old man himself, I knew, was over at the mansion, pacing the floor of the library and cursing with classic curses. We were going to try that night to pass the Bailey bill over his veto. “But the third floor blazed with electric lights, and the big dome was full of noisy echoes. The senate kept its coat on--you know how they mimic decorum over there--but the house was in its shirt-sleeves, huddled like a pack of wolves around the speaker’s dais, with faces ripe with whisky, shaking its fists under the umbrella of cigar smoke. Every fellow was trying to get his bill passed in the last hour of the session--you know what it is, Hank?” “Oah, yes,” replied Jennings, “but ’tain’t nothin’ to what ’t used to be under the ol’ constitution. We’d stack a pile o’ them ’ere private acts up on the clerk’s desk, an’ pass ’em all t’ oncet ’ith a whoop. Them ’as the days--but that ’as ’fore your time.” “Those must have been good old days,” assented the lobbyist, “for the gang.” “I reckon! A feller could ’a’ done business in them days! Ol’ John M.’d better left the ol’ constitution alone--it ’as good enough. But there ’as a passion fer change right after the war.” The lobbyist politely nodded concurrence in this view and continued: