"No, sir; a man of marked physique. I did not give this information at the time to any of my law partners, but they smiled when I told them that Harrington would pay more reward to Barbour (the sheriff) and we would never hear of it again. And we never did hear of it till we published it in the last campaign, to which Harrington, who still lives there, made no response whatever. Colonel Thomas H. Herndon, a prominent lawyer of Mobile, said to me that a friend saw Harrington, during the last session of the legislature at which he presided, take a crowd off to drink champagne at a barroom known as the Rialto, in Montgomery, and when remonstrated with for his extravagance, he ran his hand in his pocket and pulled out seventeen one-hundred-dollar bills, with the remark that he could afford it, as he had made that much in one day in engineering a bill through the house." The general further testified that Eugene Beebe, of Montgomery, told him he paid Harrington a sum of money to advocate a lottery charter before the house. He said that of the representatives whom he "approached" on the subject of the lottery, only one, a negro, exhibited any qualms, and he accepted fifty dollars, protesting that it was only "as a loan." When Colonel Joseph Hodgson became superintendent of education, he said that county superintendents had embezzled between $50,000 and $60,000 of school funds. Two sons of the former state superintendent were fugitives on that account. Mr. P. T. Sayer, speaking of the Montgomery county representatives in the lower house of the legislature, said: "One of them is a man who came from Austria, by the name of Stroback. I understood that he was a sutler or something of that kind in the federal army. I further understood that he never has been naturalized; I do not know about that. He was said to be a gentleman in his own country; I do not know about that, but he certainly is not one in Montgomery. He is a man of a great deal of sense, and I think a dangerous man in any community situated as ours is. The others are three negroes." These character sketches of radical officials might be multiplied indefinitely, but the monotony would weary the reader. Necessarily others will be mentioned incidentally as this story of reconstruction progresses. CHAPTER TEN RUINOUS MISGOVERNMENT