Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Old Judge Priest

III. JUDGE PRIEST COMES BACK

FROM time to time persons of an inquiring turn of mind have been moved audibly to speculate – I might even say to ponder – regarding the enigma underlying the continued presence in the halls of our National Congress of the Honourable Dabney Prentiss. All were as one in agreeing that he had a magnificent delivery, but in this same connection it has repeatedly been pointed out that he so rarely had anything to deliver. Some few among this puzzled contingent, knowing, as they did, the habits and customs of the people down in our country, could understand that in a corner of the land where the gift of tongue is still highly revered and the golden chimings of a full-jewelled throat are not yet entirely lost in the click of cash registers and the whir of looms, how the Honourable Dabney within his limitations might have been oratorically conspicuous and politically useful, not alone to himself but to others. But as a constructive statesman sent up to Washington, District of Columbia, and there engaged in shaping loose ends of legislation into the welded and the tempered law, they could not seem to see him at all. It was such a one, an editorial writer upon a metropolitan daily, who once referred to Representative Prentiss as The Human Voice. The title stuck, a fact patently testifying to its aptness. That which follows here in this chapter is an attempt to explain the mystery of this gentleman’s elevation to the high places which he recently adorned.

To go back to the very start of things we must first review briefly the case of old Mr. Lysander John Curd, even though he be but an incidental figure in the narrative. He was born to be incidental, I reckon, heredity, breeding and the chance of life all conspiring together to fit him for that inconsequential rôle. He was born to be a background. The one thing he ever did in all his span on earth to bring him for a moment into the front of the picture was that, having reached middle age, he took unto himself a young wife. But since he kept her only long enough to lose her, even this circumstance did not serve to focus the attention of the community upon his uncoloured personality for any considerable period of time.

Considering him in all his aspects – as a volunteer soldier in the Great War, as a district schoolteacher, as a merchant in our town, as a bachelor of long standing, as a husband for a fleeting space, and as a grass widower for the rest of his days – I have gleaned that he never did anything ignoble or anything conspicuous. Indeed, I myself, who knew him as a half-grown boy may know a middle-aged man, find it hard after the lapse of years to describe him physically for you. I seem to recall that he was neither tall nor short, neither thick nor thin. He had the customary number of limbs and the customary number of features arranged in the customary way – I know that, of course. It strikes me that his eyes were mild and gentle, that he was, as the saying runs, soft-spoken and that his whiskers were straggly and thin, like young second growth in a new clearing; also that he wore his winter overcoat until the hot suns of springtime scorched it, and that he clung to his summer alpaca and his straw hat until the frosts of autumn came along and nipped them with the sweet-gum and the dogwood. That lets me out. Excusing these things, he abides merely as a blur in my memory.

On a certain morning of a certain year, the month being April, Judge Priest sat at his desk in his chamber, so-called, on the right-hand side of the long hall in the old courthouse, as you came in from the Jefferson Street door. He was shoulders deep down in his big chair, with both his plump legs outstretched and one crossed over the other, and he was reading a paper-bound volume dealing in the main with certain inspiring episodes in the spectacular life of a Western person known as Trigger Sam. On his way downtown from home that morning he had stopped by Wilcox & Powell’s bookstore and purchased this work at the price of five cents; it was the latest production of the facile pen of a popular and indefatigable author of an earlier day than this, the late Ned Buntline. In his hours of leisure and seclusion the judge dearly loved a good nickel library, especially one with a lot of shooting and some thrilling rescues in it. Now he was in the middle of one of the most exciting chapters when there came a mild rap at the outer door. Judge Priest slid the Trigger Sam book into a half-open drawer and called out:

“Come right on in, whoever ‘tis.”

The door opened and old Mr. Lysander John Curd entered, in his overcoat, with his head upon his chest.

“Good morning, Judge Priest,” he said in his gentle halting drawl; “could I speak with you in private a minute? It’s sort of a personal matter and I wouldn’t care to have anybody maybe overhearing.”

“You most certainly could,” said Judge Priest. He glanced through into the adjoining room at the back, where Circuit Clerk Milam and Sheriff Giles Birdsong, heads together, were busy over the clerical details of the forthcoming term of circuit court. Arising laboriously from his comfortable place he waddled across and kicked the open door between the two rooms shut with a thrust of a foot clad in a box-toed, low-quartered shoe. On his way back to his desk he brushed an accumulation of old papers out of a cane-bottomed chair. “Set down here, Lysandy,” he said in that high whiny voice of his, “and let’s hear whut’s on your mind. Nice weather, ain’t it?”

An eavesdropper trained, mayhap, in the psychology of tone and gesture might have divined from these small acts and this small utterance that Judge Priest had reasons for suspecting what was on his caller’s mind; as though this visit was not entirely unexpected, even though he had had no warning of it. There was in the judge’s words an intangible inflection of understanding, say, or sympathy; no, call it compassion – that would be nearer to it. The two old men – neither of them would ever see sixty-five again – lowered themselves into the two chairs and sat facing each other across the top of the judge’s piled and dusty desk. Through his steel-rimmed glasses the judge fixed a pair of kindly, but none-the-less keen, blue eyes on Mr. Lysander Curd’s sagged and slumped figure. There was despondency and there was embarrassment in all the drooping lines of that elderly frame. Judge Priest’s lips drew up tightly, and unconsciously he nodded – the brief nod that a surgeon might employ on privately confirming a private diagnosis.

The other did not detect these things – neither the puckering of the lips nor the small forward bend of the judge’s head. His own chin was in his collar and his own averted eyes were on the floor. One of his hands – a gnarly, rather withered hand it must have been – reached forth absently and fumbled at a week-old copy of the Daily Evening News that rested upon a corner of the desk. The twining fingers tore a little strip loose from the margin of a page and rolled it up into a tiny wad.

For perhaps half a minute there was nothing said. Then Judge Priest bent forward suddenly and touched the nearermost sleeve of Mr. Curd with a gentle little half-pat.

“Well, Lysandy?” he prompted.

“Well, Judge.” The words were the first the visitor had uttered since his opening speech, and they came from him reluctantly. “Well, sir, it would seem like I hardly know how to start. This is a mighty personal matter that I’ve come to see you in regards to – and it’s just a little bit hard to speak about it even to somebody that I’ve known most of my life, same as I’ve always known you. But things in my home have finally come to a head, and before the issue reaches you in an official capacity as the judge on the bench I sort of felt like it might help some – might make the whole thing pass off easier for all concerned – if I could have a few words with you privately, as a friend and as a former comrade in arms on the field of battle.”

“Yes, Lysandy, go ahead. I’m listenin’,” stated Judge Priest, as the other halted.

Old Mr. Curd raised his face and in his faded eyes there was at once a bewildered appeal and a fixed and definite resolution. He spoke on very slowly and carefully, choosing his words as he went, but without faltering:

“I don’t know as you know about it, Judge Priest – the chances are you naturally wouldn’t – but in a domestic way things haven’t been going very smoothly with me – with us, I should say – for quite a spell back. I reckon after all it’s a mistake on the part of a man after he’s reached middle age and got set in his ways to be taking a young wife, more especially if he can’t take care of her in the way she’s been used to, or anyhow in the way she’d like to be taken care of. I suppose it’s only human nature for a young woman to hanker after considerable many things that a man like me can’t always give her – jewelry and pretty things, and social life, and running round and seeing people, and such as that. And Luella – well, Luella really ain’t much more than a girl herself yet, is she?”

The question remained unanswered. It was plain, too, that Mr. Curd had expected no answer to it, for he went straight on:

“So I feel as if the blame for what’s happened is most of it mine. I reckon I was too old to be thinking about getting married in the first place. And I wasn’t very well off then either – not well enough off to have the money I should’ve had if I expected to make Luella contented. Still, all that part of it’s got nothing to do with the matter as it stands – I’m just telling it to you, Judge, as a friend.”

“I understand, Lysandy,” said Judge Priest almost in the tone which he might have used to an unhappy child. “This is all a strict confidence between us two and this is all the further it’ll ever go, so fur ez I’m concerned, without you authorise me to speak of it.”

He waited for what would come next. It came in slow, steady sentences, with the regularity of a statement painfully rehearsed beforehand: “Judge Priest, I’ve never been a believer in divorce as a general thing. It seemed to me there was too much of that sort of thing going on round this country. That’s always been my own private doctrine, more or less. But in my own case I’ve changed my mind. We’ve been talking it over back and forth and we’ve decided – Luella and me have – that under the circumstances a divorce is the best thing for both of us; in fact we’ve decided that it’s the only thing. I want that Luella should be happy and I think maybe I’ll feel easier in my own mind when it’s all over and done with and settled up according to the law. I’m aiming to do what’s best for both parties – and I want that Luella should be happy. I want that she should be free to live her own life in her own way without me hampering her. She’s young and she’s got her whole life before her – that’s what I’m thinking of.”

He paused and with his tongue he moistened his lips, which seemed dry.

“I don’t mind telling you I didn’t feel this way about it first-off. It was a pretty tolerably hard jolt to me – the way the proposition first came up. I’ve spent a good many sleepless nights thinking it over. At least I couldn’t sleep very much for thinking of it,” he amended with the literal impulse of a literal mind to state things exactly and without exaggeration. “And then finally I saw my way clear to come to this decision. And so – ”

“Lysandy Curd,” broke in Judge Priest, “I don’t aim to give you any advice. In the first place, you ain’t asked fur it; and in the second place, even ef you had asked, I’d hesitate a monstrous long time before I’d undertake to advice any man about his own private family affairs. But I jest want to ask you one thing right here: It wasn’t you, was it, that first proposed the idea of this here divorce?”

“Well, no, Judge, I don’t believe ‘twas,” confessed the old man whose misery-reddened eyes looked into Judge Priest’s from across the littered desk. “I can’t say as it was me that first suggested it. But that’s neither here nor there. The point I’m trying to get at is just this:

“The papers have all been drawn up and they’ll be bringing them in here sometime to-day to be filed – the lawyers in the case will, Bigger & Quigley. Naturally, with me and Luella agreeing as to everything, there’s not going to be any fight made in your court. And after it’s all over I’m aiming to sell out my feed store – it seems like I haven’t been able to make it pay these last few months, the same as it used to pay, and debts have sort of piled up on me some way. I reckon the fellow that said two could live as cheap as one didn’t figure on one of them being a young woman – pretty herself and wanting pretty things to wear and have round the house. But I shouldn’t say that – I’ve come to see how it’s mainly my fault, and I’m figuring on how to spare Luella in every way that it’s possible to spare her. So as I was saying, I’m figuring, when it’s all over, on selling out my interests here, such as they are, and going back to live on that little farm I own out yonder in the Lone Elm district. It’s got a mortgage on it that I put on it here some months back, but I judge I can lift that and get the place clear again, if I’m given a fair amount of time to do it in.

“And now that everything’s been made clear to you, I want to ask you, Judge, to do all in your power to make things as easy as you can for Luella. I’d a heap rather there wouldn’t be any fuss made over this case in the newspapers. It’s just a straight, simple divorce suit, and after all it’s just between me and my present wife, and it’s more our business than ‘tis anybody else’s. So, seeing as the case is not going to be defended, I’d take it as a mighty big favour on your part if you’d shove it up on the docket for the coming term of court, starting next Monday, so as we could get it done and over with just as soon as possible. That’s my personal wish, and I know it’s Luella’s wish too. In fact she’s right anxious on that particular point. And here’s one more thing: I reckon that young Rawlings boy, that’s taken a job reporting news items for the Daily Evening News, will be round here in the course of the day, won’t he?”

“He likely will,” said Judge Priest; “he comes every day – purty near it. Why?”

“Well,” said Mr. Curd, “I don’t know him myself except by sight, and I don’t feel as if I was in a position to be asking him to do anything for me. But I thought, maybe, if you spoke to him yourself when he came, and put it on the grounds of a favour to you, maybe he’d not put any more than just a little short piece in the paper saying suit had been filed – Curd against Curd – for a plain divorce, or maybe he might leave it out of his paper altogether. I’d like to see Luella shielded from any newspaper talk. It’s not as if there was a scandal in it or a fight was going to be made.” He bent forward in his eagerness. “Do you reckon you could do that much for me, Judge Priest – for old times’ sake?”

“Ah-hah,” assented Judge Priest. “I reckin part of it kin be arranged anyway. I kin have Lishy Milam set the case forward on the docket at the head of the list of uncontested actions. And I’ll mention the matter to that there young Rawlings ef you want me to. Speaking personally, I should think jest a line or two ought to satisfy the readers of the Daily Evenin’ News. Of course him bein’ a reporter and all that, he’ll probably want to know whut the facts are ez set forth in your petition – whut allegations are made in – ”

He stopped in mid-speech, seeing how the other had flinched at this last. Mr. Curd parted his lips to interrupt, but the old judge, having no wish to flick wounds already raw, hurried on: “Don’t you worry, Lysandy, I’ll be glad to speak to young Rawlings. I jedge you’ve got no call to feel uneasy about whut’s goin’ to be said in print. You was sayin’ jest now that the papers would be filed sometime to-day?” “They’ll be filed to-day sure.”

“And no defence is to be made?” continued Judge Priest, tallying off the points on his fingers. “And you’ve retained Bigger & Quigley to represent you – that’s right, ain’t it?”

“Hold on a minute, Judge,” Mr. Curd was shaking his whity-grey head in dissent. “I’ve taken up a lot of your valuable time already, and still it would seem like I haven’t succeeded in getting this affair all straight in your mind. Bigger & Quigley are not going to represent me. They’re going to represent Luella.”

He spoke as one stating an accepted and easily understood fact, yet at the words Judge Priest reared back as far as his chair would let him go and his ruddy cheeks swelled out with the breath of amazement.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he demanded, “that you ain’t the plaintiff here?”

“Why, Judge Priest,” answered Mr. Curd, “you didn’t think for a minute, did you, that I’d come into court seeking to blacken my wife’s good name? She’s been thoughtless, maybe, but I know she don’t mean any harm by it, and besides look how young she is. It’s her, of course, that’s asking for this divorce – I thought you understood about that from the beginning.” Still in his posture of astonishment, Judge Priest put another question and put it briskly: “Might it be proper fur me to ask on what grounds this lady is suin’ you fur a divorce?”

A wave of dull red ran up old Mr. Curd’s throat and flooded his shamed face to the hair line.

“On two grounds,” he said – “non-support and drunkenness.”

“Non-support?”

“Yes; I haven’t been able to take care of her lately as I should like to, on account of my business difficulties and all.”

“But look here at me, Lysandy Curd – you ain’t no drunkard. You never was one. Don’t tell me that!”

“Well, now, Judge Priest,” argued Mr. Curd, “you don’t know about my private habits, and even if I haven’t been drinking in public up to now, that’s no sign I’m not fixing to start in doing so. Besides which my keeping silent shows that I admit to everything, don’t it? Well, then?” He stood up. “Well, I reckon that’s all. I won’t be detaining you any longer. I’m much obliged to you, Judge, and I wish you good-day, sir.”

For once Judge Priest forgot his manners. He uttered not a syllable, but only stared through his spectacles in stunned and stricken silence while Mr. Curd passed out into the hallway, gently closing the door behind him. Then Judge Priest vented his emotions in a series of snorts.

In modern drama what is technically known as the stage aside has gone out of vogue; it is called old-fashioned. Had a latter-day playwright been there then, he would have resented the judge’s thoughtlessness in addressing empty space. Nevertheless that was exactly what the judge did.

“Under the strict letter of the law I ought to throw that case out of court, I s’pose. But I’m teetotally dam’ ef I do any sech thing!.. That old man’s heart is broke now, and there ain’t no earthly reason that I kin think of why that she-devil should be allowed to tromp on the pieces. And that’s jest exactly whut she’ll do, shore ez shootin’, unless she’s let free mighty soon to go her own gait… Their feet take hold on hell… I’ll bet in the Kingdom there’ll be many a man that was called a simple-minded fool on this earth that’ll wear the biggest, shiniest halo old Peter kin find in stock.”

He reached for the Trigger Sam book, but put it back again in the drawer. He reached into a gaping side pocket of his coat for his corncob pipe, but forgot to charge the fire-blackened bowl from the tobacco cannister that stood handily upon his desk. Chewing hard upon the discoloured cane stem of his pipe, he projected himself toward the back room and opened the door, to find Mr. Milam, the circuit clerk, and Mr. Birdsong, the sheriff, still engaged together in official duties there.

“Lishy,” he said from the doorway, “young Rawlings generally gits round here about two o’clock in the evenin’, don’t he?”

“Generally about two or two-thirty,” said Mr. Milam.

“I thought so. Well, to-day when he comes tell him, please, I want to see him a minute in my chambers.”

“What if you’re not here? Couldn’t I give him the message?”

“I’ll be here,” promised the judge. “And there’s one thing more: Bigger & Quigley will file a divorce petition to-day – Curd versus Curd is the title of the suit. Put it at the head of the list of undefended actions, please, Lishy, ez near the top of the docket ez you kin.”

“Curd? Is it the Lysander Curds, Judge?”, asked Mr. Milam.

“You guessed right the very first pop – it’s the Lysandy Curds,” said Judge Priest grimly.

“Well, for one I’m not surprised,” said Mr. Milam. “If poor old Lysander hadn’t stayed blind for about two years after the rest of this town got its eyes wide open this suit would have been filed long before now.”

But Judge Priest didn’t hear him. He had closed the door.

Mr. Milam looked meaningly at Mr. Birdsong. Mr. Birdsong felt in his pocket for his plug and helped himself to a copious chew, meanwhile looking meaningly back at Mr. Milam. With the cud properly bestowed in his right jaw Mr. Birdsong gave vent to what for him was a speech of considerable length: ‘“Jedge said Bigger & Quigley, didn’t he? Well, they’re a good smart team of lawyers, but ef I was in Lysander John Curd’s shoes I think I’d intrust my interests in this matter to a different firm than them.”

“Who’s that?” inquired Mr. Milam.

“It’s a Yankee firm up North,” answered Mr. Birdsong, masticating slowly. “One named Smith and the other’n named Wesson.”

It will be noted that our worthy sheriff fell plump into the same error over which Judge Priest’s feet had stumbled a few minutes earlier – he assumed offhand, Sheriff Birdsong did, that in this cause of Curd against Curd the husband was to play the rôle of the party aggrieved. Indeed, we may feel safe in assuming that at first blush almost anybody in our town would have been guilty of that same mistake. The real truth in this regard, coming out, as it very shortly did – before sunset of that day, in fact – gave the community a profound shock. From house to house, from street to street and from civic ward to civic ward the tale travelled, growing as it went. The Daily Evening News carried merely the barest of bare statements, coupled with the style of the action and the names of the attorneys for the plaintiff; but with spicy added details, pieced out from surmise and common rumour, the amazing tidings percolated across narrow roads and through the panels of partition fences with a rapidity which went far toward proving that the tongue is mightier than the printed line, or at least is speedier.

When you see a woman hasten forth from her house with eyes that burn and hear her hail her neighbour next door; when you see their two heads meet above the intervening pickets and observe that one is doing the talking and the other is doing the listening, sucking her breath in, gaspingly, at frequent intervals; and when on top of this you take note that, having presently parted company with the first, the second woman speeds hot-foot to call her neighbour upon the other side, all men may know by these things alone that a really delectable scandal has been loosed upon the air. Not once but many times this scene was enacted in our town that night, between the going-down of the sun and the coming-up of the moon. Also that magnificent adjunct of modern civilisation, the telephone, helped out tremendously in spreading the word.

Hard upon the heels of the first jolting disclosure correlated incidents eventuated, and these, as the saying goes, supplied fuel to the flames. Just before supper-time old Mr. Ly-sander Curd went with dragging feet and downcast head to Mrs. Teenie Morrill’s boarding house, carrying in one hand a rusty valise, and from Mrs. Morrill he straightway engaged board and lodging for an indefinite period. And in the early dusk of the evening Mrs. Lysander Curd drove out in the smart top-phaeton that her husband had given her on her most recent birthday – she sitting very erect and handling the ribbons on her little spirited bay mare very prettily, and seemingly all oblivious to the hostile eyes which stared at her from sidewalks and porch fronts. About dark she halted at the corner of Clay and Contest, where a row of maples, new fledged with young leaves, made a thick shadow across the road.

Exactly there, as it so chanced, State Senator Horace K. Maydew happened to be loitering about, enjoying the cooling breezes of the spring night, and he lifted his somewhat bulky but athletic forty-year-old form into the phaeton alongside of the lady. In close conversation they were seen to drive out Contest and to turn into the Towhead Road; and – if we may believe what that willing witness, old Mrs. Whitridge, who lived at the corner of Clay and Contest, had to say upon the subject – it was ten minutes of eleven o’clock before they got back again to that corner. Mrs. Whitridge knew the exact hour, because she stayed up in her front room to watch, with one eye out of the bay window and the other on the mantel clock. To be sure, this had happened probably a hundred times before – this meeting of the pair in the shadows of the water maples, this riding in company over quiet country roads until all hours – but by reason of the day’s sensational developments it now took on an enhanced significance. Mrs. Whitridge could hardly wait until morning to call up, one by one, the members of her circle of intimate friends. I judge the telephone company never made much money off of Mrs. Whitridge even in ordinary times; she rented her telephone by the month and she used it by the hour.

As we are following the course of things with some regard for their chronological sequence, perhaps I should state here that on the next day but one the Lysander John Curd hay and feed store was closed on executions sworn out by a coterie of panic-stricken creditors. It is a mistake, I think, to assume that rats always leave a sinking ship. It has been my limited observation that, if they are commercial rats, they stay aboard and nibble more holes in the hull. However, that is neither here nor there.

In less than no time at all following this – in less than two weeks thereafter, to be exact – the coils which united Mr. Lysander Curd and Luella his wife in the bonds of matrimony were by due process of the statutory law unloosed and slackened off. Being free, the ex-husband promptly gathered together such meagre belongings as he might call his own and betook himself to that little mortgage-covered farm of his out Lone Elm way. Being free also, the ex-wife with equal celerity became the bride of State Senator Horace K. Maydew, with a handy justice of the peace to officiate at the ceremony. It was characteristic of State Senator Maydew that he should move briskly in consummating this, the paramount romance of his life. For he was certainly an up-and-coming man.

There was no holding him down, it seemed. Undoubtedly he was a rising light, and the lady who now bore his name was bound and determined that she rise with him. She might have made one matrimonial mistake, but this time she had hitched her wagon to a star – a star which soared amain and cast its radiance afar. Soon she was driving her own car – and a seven-passenger car at that. They sent to Chicago for an architect to design their new home on Flournoy Boulevard and to Louisville for a decorator to decorate it. It wasn’t the largest house in town, but it was by long odds the smartest.

The Senator willed that she should have the best of everything, and she had it. For himself he likewise desired much. His was an uneasy ambition, which ate into him like a canker and gave him no peace. Indeed, peace was not of his craving. He watered his desire with the waters of self-appreciation and mulched it with constant energy, and behold it grew like the gourd and bourgeoned like the bay. He had been mayor; at this time he was state senator; presently it was to transpire that he would admire to be more than that.

Always his handclasp had been ardent and clinging. Now the inner flames that burned its owner made it feverish to the touch. His smile was as warming as a grate fire and almost as wide. Shoulders were made for him to slap, and children had been created into the world to the end that he might inquire regarding their general health and well doing. Wherefore parents – and particularly young parents – were greatly drawn to him. If there was a lodge he joined it; if there was a church fair he went to it; if there was an oration to be made he made it. His figure broadened and took on a genial dignity. Likewise in the accumulation of worldly goods he waxed amazingly well. His manner was paternal where it was not fraternal. His eye, though, remained as before – a sharp, greedy, appraising eye. There is no alibi for a bad eye. Still, a lot of people never look as high as the eyes. They stop at the diamond in the scarfpin.

When a vacancy occurred in the district chairmanship it seemed quite in keeping with the trend of the political impulses of the times that Senator Maydew should slip into the hole. Always a clever organiser, he excelled his past record in building up and strengthening the district organisation. It wasn’t long before he had his fences as they should be – hog-tight, horse-high and bull-strong.

Yet in the midst of manifold activities he found time to be an attentive and indulgent husband. If the new Mrs. Maydew did not enjoy the aloof society of those whom we fondly call down our way The Old Families, at least she had her fine new home, and her seven-passenger car, and her generous and loving husband. And she was content; you could tell that by her air and her expression at all times. Some thought there was just a trace of defiance in her bearing.

It was just about a year after her marriage to him that the Senator, in response to the demands of a host of friends and admirers – so ran the language of his column-long paid-for card in the Daily Evening News and other papers – announced himself as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for congressman. Considering conditions and everything, the occasion appeared to be propitious for such action on his part. The incumbent, old Major J. C. C. Guest, had been congressman a long, long time – entirely too long a time, some were beginning to say. He had never been a particularly exciting personage, even back yonder in those remote dim days of his entry into public life. At the beginning his principal asset and his heaviest claim upon the support of his fellow-citizens had been an empty trouser-leg.