Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/118

 in the poorhouse. Yes, I'm going home—but"—he stopped and looked the lobbyist in the eye—"I'm going home an honest man."

My friend the whip told me the story as a curious and somewhat confusing flaw in his theory that every man is for sale,—"most of them damned cheap," he said,—and he thought it might make a plot for a story; like many men I have known he was incorrigibly romantic, and was always giving me plots for stories. Well, they failed to pass the bill over the Governor's veto, and it was not long until another story was pretty well known in Illinois, about that Governor who that night was sitting up over in the executive mansion, awaiting the action of the general assembly. The story was that a large quantity of the bonds of the gas company had been placed at his disposal in a security vault in Chicago, in a box to which a man was to deliver him the key; all he had to do was to go take the bonds—and permit the bill to become a law. His answer, of course, was the veto—an offense as unpardonable as the pardoning of the anarchists; and no doubt many such offenses against the invisible power in the land were more potent in bringing down on his head that awful hatred than his mercy had been—though this was made to serve as reason for the hatred. Privilege, of course, hates mercy, too.

The old Egyptian went back home, and I have always hoped that he found a better job than he went to seek in the harvest-fields, and that he did not die at last to the poorhouse; but he was never heard of more, and it was not long until the Gov