"Will this hurt Virginia's feelings if it is printed?" I asked. "No, no," he said. "It will make her fiancé a hero. It will tickle her," said he, "half to death." Then I told Dick he might go on with it if he would leave it just as it was. The joke was on him, after all, for there was nothing in it about my fight with Buck Gowdy, or of my robbing him of the team and sleigh and harness and robes and Nick, the little dog. The third thing that N.V. thought might have sent me down through the greased tin horn of politics, which has ruined more good men than any other form of gambling, was my management of the business of getting the township set off, against the opposition of the whole Monterey Centre Ring. But he did not know of that day in Dubuque, and of my smuggling of Mrs. Bliven into Iowa, as I have told it in this history. It hurt Bliven politically, but he kept on boosting me, and it was his electioneering, that I knew nothing about, that elected me justice of the peace; and it was Mrs. Bliven's urging that caused me to qualify by being sworn in--though I couldn't see what she meant by her interest. 6 On my next birthday, the twenty-seventh of July, however, something happened that after a few months of figuring made me think that they knew what they were about all the time; for on that day they (the Blivens) got up a surprise party on us, and came in such rigs as they had (there were more light rigs than at the Governor Wade reception, a fact of historical interest as showing progress); though Virginia did not seem to be much surprised. In the course of the evening Doc Bliven started in making fun of me as a justice of the peace. "I helped a little to elect you, Jake," said he, "but I'll bet you couldn't make out a mittimus if you had to send a criminal to jail to-night." "I won't bet," I said, "I know I couldn't!" "I'll bet the oysters for the crowd, Squire Vandemark," he went on deviling me, "that you couldn't perform the marriage ceremony." Now here he came closer to my abilities, for I had been through a marriage ceremony lately, and I have a good memory--and oysters were a novelty in Iowa, coming in tin cans and called cove oysters, put up in Baltimore. It looked like a chance to stick Doc Bliven, and while I was hesitating, Mrs. Bliven whispered that there was a form for the ceremony in the instruction book. "I'll bet you the oysters for the crowd I can," I said. "You furnish the happy couple--and I'll see that you furnish the oyster supper, too." "Any couple will do," said the doctor. "Come, Mollie, we may as well go through it again."