So another year passed. Then came hard times,--_real_ hard times. I had some clients--enough to insure mother and myself a living, with the interest on mortgage and note kept down. But my clients were poor, and poor pay, and slow pay. Nobody was doing well but the note-shavers. I--How mother fought to keep the front brave and bright!--not her front, for that was bright by nature, like the sky beyond the clouds; but our front, my front,--the front of our affairs. No one must see that we were pinching,--so I must be the most obviously prosperous young lawyer in Pulaski. What that struggle cost her I did not then realize; no, could not realize until I looked at her face for the last time, looked and turned away and thought on the meaning of the lines and the hollows over which Death had spread his proclamation of eternal peace. I have heard it said of those markings in human faces, "How ugly!" But it seems to me that, to any one with eyes and imagination, line and wrinkle and hollow always have the somber grandeur of tragedy. I remember my mother when her face was smooth and had the shallow beauty that the shallow dote on. But her face whereon was written the story of fearlessness, sacrifice, and love,--that is the face beautiful of my mother for me. In the midst of those times of trial, when she had ceased to smile,--for she had none of that hypocritical cheerfulness which depresses and is a mere vanity to make silly onlookers cry "Brave!" when there is no true bravery,--just when we were at our lowest ebb, came an offer from Bill Dominick to put me into politics. I had been interested in politics ever since I was seven years old. I recall distinctly the beginning:-- On a November afternoon,--it must have been November, though I remember that it was summer-warm, with all the windows open and many men in the streets in shirt-sleeves,--at any rate, I was on my way home from school. As I neared the court-house I saw a crowd in the yard and was reminded that it was election day, and that my father was running for reelection to the state senate; so, I bolted for his law office in the second story of the Masonic Temple, across the street from the court-house.