Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/44

 tails and manes braided for a month that they might roll forth in noble curls when they were loosened, and the horses harnessed to a carriage containing four veterans of the Revolution, who were to be thus splendidly drawn to the raising of a tall hickory pole in honor of James Buchanan, that year a candidate for president. But the old diplomatist made such a miserable weakling failure of his administration that his Piqua partizan became disgusted and renounced forever his interest in political affairs, and, like Henry I., never smiled again.

But my Grandfather Brand, when he was not talking about poetry or the war, was talking about politics; sometimes world politics, for he was interested in that; sometimes European politics, which he had followed ever since in Paris he had witnessed the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, or national politics, or state politics, or, in default of a larger interest, local politics, which in Ohio, as no doubt elsewhere, sometimes looms largest and most important of all, because, perhaps, as De Tocqueville says, local assemblies constitute the strength of free institutions.

My grandfather was then, at the time of which I am thinking even if I am not very specifically writing about it, mayor—and continued to be mayor for four terms. It was an office that was suited, no doubt, to the leisure of his retirement, and while it gave him the feeling of being occupied in public affairs, it nevertheless left him opportunities enough for his German poets, and for his horses and his