Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/116

 political correspondents have cultivated the sense, and that night they could have divined nothing good or pure or beautiful in that chamber (where the portraits of Lincoln and of Douglas hung), unless it were the mellow music, now and then, of the glass prisms of the chandeliers hanging high from the garish ceiling, as they tinkled and chimed whenever some little breeze wandered in from the June night.

And yet there was beauty there, moral beauty, as there ever is somewhere in man. Out on the edge of that bedlam, standing under the gallery on the Democratic side, near the cloak-room, stood a tall, lank man. You would have known him at once, anywhere, as an Egyptian, as we called those who had come from the Illinois land south of the old O. & M. railroad. He was uncouth in appearance; he wore drab, ill-fitting clothes, and at his wrinkled throat there was no collar. He was a member, sent there from some rural district far down in the southern end of the state; and all through the session he had been silent, taking no part, except to vote, and to vote, on most occasions, with his party, which, in those days, was the whole duty of man. This night would see the end of his political career, if his brief experience in an obscure position could be called a career, and he stood there, silently looking on, plucking now and then at his chin, his long, wrinkled face brown and solemn and inscrutable.

The old Egyptian stood there while the long roll was being called, and the crisis approached, and the nervous tension was a keen pain. And suddenly one of the gas lobbyists went up to him, there on