Jane Dround was right about old Senator Parkinson. He came home to die early in the fall, and faded away in a couple of months afterward. The political pot at the capital of the state then began to hum in a lively fashion. It was suspected that the Governor himself wanted to succeed the late Senator, and there were one or two Congressmen and a judge whose friends thought they were of senatorial size. That was the talk on the surface and in the papers. But the situation was very different underneath. The legislature might be said, in a general way, to represent the people of the state of Illinois, but it represented also the railroad interests, the traction and gas interests, and the packers, and when it came to a matter of importance it pretty generally did what it was told by its real bosses. This time it was told to put me in the Senate in place of the late Senator, and it obeyed orders after a time. Carmichael was honest with me, and stuck to his agreement to use the Strauss lobby in the legislature in my behalf. Of course the papers in Chicago howled, all those that hadn't their mouths stopped with the right cake. The three largest papers couldn't be reached by our friends in any way, but their scoring did little harm. They had up again the story of Judge Garretson and the bonds of the London and Chicago concern. But the story was getting a little hazy in men's memories, and that kind of talk is passed around so often when a man runs for office in our country that it hasn't much significance. We did not even think it worth while to answer it. Besides, to tell the truth, we had nothing much to say. Our policy was, of necessity, what Slocum sarcastically described as "dignified silence." When my name began to be heard at Springfield more and more insistently, the Chicago _Thunderer_ came out with a terrific roast editorially:-- "Who is this fellow, E.V. Harrington, who has the presumption to look lustfully on the chair of our late honorable Senator? Eighteen years ago Harrington was driving a delivery wagon for a packing firm, and there are to-day on the West Side retail marketmen who remember his calls at their places. We believe that his first rise in fortune came when, in some tricky way, he got hold of a broken-down sausage plant, which he sold later to the redoubtable Strauss. But it was not until the year '95, when the notorious American Meat Products Company was launched, that Harrington emerged from the obscurity of the Stock Yards. That corporation, conceived in fraud, promoted by bribery, was the child of his fertile brain. Not content with this enterprise, he became involved in railroad promotion in the Southwest, and he and his man Friday, Slocum, were celebrated as the most skilful manipulators of legislative lobbies ever seen in the experienced state of Texas.