"That's John Stedman, manager of the Union Iron Works of Parkinton, a manufacturing town in my State. He's one of the best iron men in the country. Fine old fellow, isn't he? He's been ill ever since his wife died, and I don't think he'll ever get over it. She had been sick for years, and he nursed her day and night. He wouldn't go to Congress, preferring to stay by her, and it almost broke his heart when she died. Poor old man,--don't look as if he was long for this world. I expected him to mop up the floor with that Englishman, sick as he is; and he would, if he hadn't apologized. I heard, too, what your friend who has just gone out said about Stedman not being the kind of a man to send to Cuba. I tell you, they might look the country over, and they couldn't find a better. That's been his strong hold, straightening out troubles of one kind or another. Everybody believes in him, and anybody takes his word. He's done a power of good in our State." "In what way?" asked the Doctor. "Oh, in settling strikes, for one thing. You see, he started from the scrap pile, and he knows the laboring man down to a dot, for he carried a dinner pail himself for ten years of his life. When the men are imposed upon he stands by 'em, and compels the manufacturers to deal square; and if they don't, he joins the men and fights it out with the bosses. If the men are wrong, and want what the furnaces can't give 'em,--and there's been a good deal of that lately,--he sails into the gangs, and, if nothing else will do, he gets a gun and joins the sheriffs. He was all through that last strike we had, three years ago, and it would be going on now but for John Stedman." "But he seems to be a man of fine education," interrupted the Doctor, who was listening attentively. "Yes, so he is,--learned it all at night schools. When he was a boy he used to fire the kilns, and they say you could always find him with a spelling-book in one hand and a chunk of wood in the other, reading nights by the light of the kiln fires." "You say he went to Congress?" The Doctor's eyes were now fixed on the speaker. "No, I said he _would_n't go. His wife was taken sick about that time, and when he found she wasn't going to get well,--she had lung trouble,--he told the committee that he wouldn't accept the nomination; and of course nomination meant election for him. He told 'em his wife had stuck by him all her life, had washed his flannel shirts for him and cooked his dinner, and that he was going to stick by her now she was down. But I tell you what he did do: he stumped the district for his opponent, because he said he was a better man than his own party put up,--and elected him, too. That was just like John Stedman. The heelers were pretty savage, but that made no difference to him.