Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/245

 *sional reformers of the morals of other persons he would not have omitted this curious specimen from his philosophic analysis, if he did omit it; and if that experience of the young civilian at Columbus had not been sufficient, I could have supplied him with another out of an episode in which I had borne a part some years before, one which should have been sufficient to warn me against the type for the rest of my life.

It concerns another young civilian, though this one was so old that he should have known better, and relates to a time years before when I happened to be running for the state senate. I say happened, for it was precisely of that fortuitous nature, since I had not been concerned in the circumstances which nominated me, so entirely negative in their character that I might as well have been said not to be running at all. I was a young lawyer, just beginning to practice, and in my wide leisure was out of town that summer, economically spending a holiday at my father's house, and, since the Democrats had no hope in this world of carrying the district, and could get no one who was on the ground to defend himself to accept their nomination, they had nominated me. It was an honor, perhaps, but so empty and futile that when I came home again it seemed useless even to decline it, and best to forget it, and so I tried to do that, and made no campaign at all. But one afternoon I had a caller, a tall, dark visaged man, in black clerical garb, who came softly into my office, carefully closed the door, and, fixing his strange, intense eyes on me, said that he came to