Puzzling how the quarrel could have begun and hurried to its climax so swiftly, Bernard Graves swung up the street heedless of his steps. Then the bland colonial facade of the public library confronted him like a smirking face and, as his vagrant fancy trifled with the conceit, its lips opened to emit two chattering girls. "I was the tenth on the waiting-list," said one. He saw that she spoke of his own volume which she held in a triumphant embrace with a box of caramels, and was filled with a nauseated disgust for his handiwork. Retracing his steps he climbed to the _Whig_ office, and finding Sprague at his desk, he swept a pile of exchanges from a chair and drew it to the editor's elbow. "Volney," he asked, "does this talk of an independent movement against Ross Shelby amount to anything?" Sprague's eye lit. "It's gathering headway every minute," he declared. "We require just one thing--a candidate of prominence and backbone." Graves reached past the paste-pot to capture a fugitive match. "What do you say to me?" "What do I say!" Unwinding his long legs from his chair rounds the editor dealt his friend a clap between the shoulders which sent his cigarette spinning to the floor. "I say you're a trump." Sprague had not a little in common with the type in the political cosmos which is contemptuously styled cloistered. Of New England stock, like most of Tuscarora, he had been born of a later migration than the pioneers', and was hence less tempered by New York influences for good or ill. Begotten a generation earlier, he would have tended transcendental pigs at Brook Farm. His earliest political recollections were associated with heated quotations from Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and the sharpest-etched memory of his childhood had to do with a runaway slave harbored in his father's garret. As a man he was given to printing Emersonian nuggets in the editorial columns of the _Whig_, his favorite sentiment being, "Hitch your wagon to a star," whose practical application led him over highways which knew not macadam. He now perceived nothing grotesque in Bernard Graves's proposal, nor did it astonish him. From his office window he had chanced to overlook the stormy meeting of the suitors, but he gave Graves no hint. "With any other candidate I can think of," he declared, "this movement would merely signify the protest of a self-respecting minority; with you, the author of the famous Samothrace ode,--gad! I think it augurs victory by a handsome majority." Graves colored. "I had forgotten the ode," he confessed. "Couldn't we eliminate that from the campaign?" "Eliminate it! Why, boy, it's half your platform."