This gentle reactionary was the antithesis of another very interesting man, known to his fellow-legislators as Citizen Corry, in recognition of his preference for the type of French Red Republicanism acquired in Paris during his stay through the academic republic of 1848-50. Such a residence would alone have given him a distinction which we can hardly realize in our time, but he was, besides, a man of great natural distinction, and of more cultivation than any of his fellow-legislators. He was one of the Representatives from Cincinnati, and when another Cincinnati Representative of his own party struck a member from the Western Reserve, Citizen Corry joined the Republicans in voting his expulsion. But he had already made a greater sensation, and created an expectation of the unexpected in all he did by proposing an amendment to the Constitution abolishing the system of dual chambers in the legislature, and retaining only the House of Representatives. I think that in Greece alone is this the actual parliamentary form, but I believe that it was in that short-lived French republic of 1848 that Corry saw its workings and conceived the notion of its superiority. Under the present system he held that the House was merely a committee at the bar of the Senate, and the Senate a committee at the bar of the House, with a great waste of time and public advantage through the working of a very clumsy machinery. His proposition was not taken seriously by the Ohio House of Representatives, but to my young enthusiasm it seemed convincing by its mere statement, and the arguments on the other side, to the effect that the delays which he censured gave time for useful reflection, appeared to me very fallacious. Citizen Corry was not re-elected to the next legislature, and his somewhat meteoric history did not include any other official apparition. But while he was passing through the orbit of my world I was fully aware of his vivid difference from the controlled and orderly planets, and he dazzled in me an imagination always too fondly seeking the bizarre and strange. I do not think I ever spoke with him, but I tingled to do so; I created him citizen of that fine and great world where I had so much of my own being in reveries that rapt me from the realities of the life about me. IV The first winter of my legislative correspondence began with a letter to my Cincinnati newspaper in which I [Illustration: _The Ohio State House at Columbus viewed from High Street_] described the public opening of the new State House. I remember the event vividly because I thought it signally important, and partly because, to relieve myself from the stress of the crowd passing through the doorways, I lifted my arms and was near having my breath crushed out. There were a ball and a banquet, but somewhere, somehow, amidst the dancing and the feeding and smoking, I found a corner where I could write out my account of the affair and so escaped with my letter and my life.