About that time old Sam Follonsby died, bequeathing half a million dollars--twice as much as anybody knew he had--to be spent on fountains and statues in the city parks and along the boulevards. The many attempts of the administration to divert the money to other uses; the efforts of the mayor to throw the estate into the hands of a trust company in which he had friends--these matters need not be recited here. Suffice it to say that Barton was equal to all the demands made upon his legal genius. When the estate was settled at the end of a year, Barton had won every point. Follonsby’s money was definitely set aside by the court as a special fund for the objects specified by the testator, and Barton, as the chairman of the Committee on Municipal Art, had so tied it up in a legal mesh of his own ingenious contriving that it was, to all intents and purposes, subject only to his personal check. It was now that Barton, long irritated by the indifference of our people to the imperative need of municipal reform, devised a plan for arousing the apathetic electorate. A philosopher, as well as a connoisseur in the fine arts, he had concluded that our whole idea of erecting statues to the good and noble serves no purpose in stirring patriotic impulses in the bosoms of beholders. There were plenty of statues and not a few tablets in our town commemorating great-souled men, but they suffered sadly from public neglect. And it must be confessed that the average statue, no matter how splendid the achievements of its subject, is little regarded and serves only passively as a reminder of public duty. With what has seemed to me a sublime cynicism, Barton proceeded to spend Follonsby’s money in a manner at once novel and arresting. He commissioned one of the most distinguished sculptors in the country to design a statue; and at the end of his second year in the council (he had been elected for four years), it was set up on the new boulevard that parallels the river. His choice of a subject had never been made known, so that curiosity was greatly excited on the day of the unveiling. Barton had brought the governor of an adjoining State, who was just then much in the public eye as a fighter of grafters, to deliver the oration. It was a speech with a sting to it, but our people had long been hardened to such lashings. The mayor spoke in praise of the civic spirit which had impelled Follonsby to make so large a bequest to the public; and then, before five thousand persons, a little schoolgirl pulled the cord, and the statue, a splendid creation in bronze, was exposed to the amazed populace.