A wonderful change is wrought in the moral atmosphere of a man by the event of an election. The candidate’s estate is vested by the announcement of the result. He owns his office for the time, and he breathes a free man. It is interesting to see how the muscles of his metaphorical knees straighten out, for the day of genuflection is over. Independence is reasserted in his eye; he bears himself as one who conquers by the prowess of his own bow and spear; and men whom he would fain conciliate last week need to search his eye for an expression they can recognize. They will be treated no more to that mollifying demonstration, the candidate’s smile. The defeated aspirant’s once bland countenance, however, has assumed all the contours of the cynic’s. A bitter sort of nonchalance with a frequent forced laugh goes better combined with peanuts, if the place is not too high in the official scale and the candidate of no great social pretensions, since the hulls can be cast off with a flouting gesture which aids the general implication that the constituency may appropriately go hang, for all he cares. He is not hurt,--not he! He made the race to oblige his friends and party, and he now and again throws out intimations of a bigger piece of pie saving for him as a reward for filling the breach. Meantime peanuts perforce suffice. Enott Blake, through much place-holding, had become imbued with the candidate’s antagonism to that assumption of all the power residing in the voting masses common to the arrogant but impotent unit. He was never elected by any one man, nor through any definitely exerted political influence. He served the people, and incidentally his own interest, and mighty glad they ought to be to get him, and this was what he felt especially after elections. If ever in the course of a canvass he had a qualm,--and it is said that the least imaginative of men are capable of nightmare,--he had the satisfaction of calling himself a fool thereafter, to think less of himself than people thought of him, and of counting endearingly his minie balls. He was a rare instance of a great personal popularity, and he had no mind to abate his pretensions before the preposterous patronage of this old mountaineer who possibly had not paid poll-tax for twenty years. He could no more be said to possess an enlightened curiosity than the hound trained to trail game could be accredited with an inquisitive interest in the natural history of the subject of his quest. It was only with a similar rudimentary instinct of the pursuit of prey that he felt stirring an intention to wring from the intruder the real reason for this strange entrance.