tion, rush headlong over the graves of Lindley Murray and Mother English, make every sentence tell, bringing partisans who are napping to the front ranks of action; while the younger orator, unlearned in the practicalities, though most learned in the orations of Cicero and Demosthenes, will waste all his power in voluble sounding phrases, well-turned sentences, neat little hits, fulsome flattery, and return to his seat to find that he has but wasted his sweetness on the desert air. The veterans smile over his youthful exuberance, and the practical workers think he has taken the occasion to display his education. Often, too, undue zeal in disciples leads them into a surfeit of eulogium of their leader which creates moral nausea in the ranks of possible voters.

Irving Chipman was not unmindful of these snares, but he was not sufficiently conscious of them to wholly avoid either the undue flattery of the leader "present at his right," or the display of a command of ornate rhetoric, with which he thought to impress the ladies' gallery, if not the more powerful pit.

Beneath this superficial stratum of vanity which prompted him to acts of gigantic folly, Chipman had still a good fund of information and considerable

political talent, and when he had ventilated his scholarship, complimented the powers that were to be, at the expense of "the powers that be," he came at last to his feet, so to speak, found his mental and moral balance, and with the "might and right of honest party principles " rang a few changes on the party questions, the coinage of silver, the tariff, labor and capital, civil service. Each party issue was well set forth, and the “honored gentleman on his right," who had shown some uneasiness during the eulogium and preamble, showed hearty approval of the orthodoxy of his disciple, and even Miss Harcourt's face wore an expression of relief that the orator had abandoned glittering generalities and promised to confine himself to a few of the dull specialties of the political situation.

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"He reminds me of Gratiano," said Miss Bender, who with Mrs. Allen had accompanied Dorothy, "because he talks such an infinite deal of nothing.' Her friend smiled appreciatively, but was apparently absorbed in a calculation of the amount of silver turned into the treasury each year while there was unlimited coinage.

"I never could understand all that," Barbara whispered. "The children are too young for political economy, I am sure, Mrs. Allen."

"And so am I, for that matter," that lady answered in a whisper. "Miss Harcourt apparently understands it."

"Oh, she is a politician's daughter—that's her education.-Dorothy, why shouldn't they coin all the silver up?"

Dorothy smiled and laid her finger on her lips, bent upon following the speaker through the silver question, as well as the tariff statistics, and the somewhat Utopian settlement of labor and capital problems. Marking her interest, it was with an added sense of merit that the orator received the congratulations of the committee and the thanks of the candidate.

CHAPTER VI.

A COMPROMISE.

IN the searching and apparently individual survey of his audience, Irving Chipman had failed to recognize the face of Arthur Bradley, who maintained an immovable position on the outside of the seated audience throughout the length of Chipman's discourse, and marked with critical discrimination all those innuendoes of expression by which the orator had attempted to win the applause of the ladies' gallery, all the self-consciousness of the speaker's attitude, all the merits and demerits of his argument. "A tissue of truths honey-combed with sycophancy," Bradley said to himself; but he was able to discern that perhaps there might be some sound doctrine in Chipman's speech, which, if presented by Harcourt himself, might carry conviction. His own prejudice against Chipman, strengthened by the belief that he was a rival not to be lightly dismissed, forced Bradley to

recapitulate those points which might have weight with Dorothy.

It must be understood that, although in love with Dorothy Harcourt, Bradley was, as yet, a most phlegmatic and reasonable lover-one whose affections were easily accommodated by the conditions of waiting and pondering upon the remote possibility of success. To him Irving Chipman represented the demagogue-the cad; but at the same time, the man whose personal success was assured by unbounded confidence and perseverance, and an impetus to action which he himself lacked. He might be ostracized by the "Beacon Street set” as "no gentleman,” but he might still turn up as Minister to the Court of St. James's, and place that same little set in his debt by a passport to royalty. Bradley's mind did not go as far as that, but he felt that Chipman's ambition was likely to be satisfied, and he realized that the atmosphere of the life into which it would lead him was that in which Miss Harcourt had always breathed and had her own being. Aside from the fact that she would be unacceptable to the Beacon Street set, as the daughter of a politician, would not the Beacon Street set be tiresome to her, with its afternoon teas, where the legends of old families were endlessly served