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 the year the legislature that chose Warren's successor in the senate was to be elected, and when the senator came home from Washington he found his fences in sad repair. The Silas Warren of the parlor suite in a Lake Front hotel was not the Si Warren whom Colonel Talbott had rescued from the dusty little law office down in Shelbyville fifteen years before. The clothes of that time were faded by the sun in which he loafed all day on the post-office corner, whereas the clothes of this spring morning bespoke a New York tailor and a valet.

The senator was not in a pleasant mood. There was opposition to his reëlection, and while his machine ignored it, and while George R. Baldwin, the lawyer who watched the interests of certain big corporations during the sessions of the legislature, said it was but a sporadic demonstration of sore-*heads, back numbers and labor skates, it was spreading, as the picturesque politicians from the corn lands of central Illinois would say, like a prairie fire. Jacksonville, where the standard of revolt had first been raised, was in Morgan, the colonel's home county, and so it came to pass that the defection was laid to the machinations of the colonel himself. And