In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim. Frances Hodgson Burnett

the Judge had been engaged in a livelier discussion than usual as he rode homeward with a select party of legal brethren from court at Brownsboro, and consequently made his appearance blustering and joyous. He bestowed upon his wife a sounding kiss, and, with one arm around her waist, shook hands with Tom in a gust of hospitality, speaking to both at once.

      “Howdy, Jenny? Howdy, Tom? It’s a coon’s age since we’ve seen you, Tom. Time you showed yourself. How are the children, Jenny—and what’s Tom Scott been doing? What’s this we hear about that stray young one? Nice tale that is to tell on a fellow. Fowler heard it at Brownsboro and like to have killed himself. Lord! how hot it’s been! I’m ready for supper, Jenny. Sit down, Tom. As soon as I get through supper, we’ll have a real old-fashioned talk. I’ve been suffering for one for three months. Jenny, tell Sophronia to spread herself on her waffles, for I’ve been getting some mighty poor stuff for the last few days. What do you think of Thatcher running for the Legislature? Lord! Lord! what a fool that fellow is! Most unpopular man in the county, and about the meanest too. Mean? Lord! mean ain’t the name for it! He’ll be beat so that any other man wouldn’t want to show his head, and it won’t make a mark on him. Nellie’s asleep, ain’t she, Jenny? I’ve got to go and look at her and the rest of them. Don’t you want to come along, Tom? You’re a family man yourself now, and you ought to take an interest!”

      He led the way into the family-room at the back and, taking the candle from the high mantel, moved it triumphantly over the beds in which the children slept.

      “Here’s Tom Scott!” he announced. “Tom Scott’s got to have a crib to himself. Look at him now. What do you think of that for a boy? He’s five years old next month, and he about runs Barnesville. The boys round here are just ruining him with making much of him and setting him up to tricks. He just lives round at the stores and the post-office. And what Tom Scott don’t know ain’t worth knowing. Came home with six jack-knives in his pockets the first day Jenny turned him out in pantaloons. The boys tried themselves to see who could do best by him. You could hear them shouting and laughing all over the town at the things they got him to say. I tell you he’s a case, Tom is. Last election he was as stirred up as any of us. Hollered ‘’Rah for Collins’ until he was hoarse and his mother brought him home and gave him syrup of squills because she thought he had the croup. What do you think he did, now? Went into Barton’s store and ordered a bushel of chestnuts to be sent down to my account and brought ’em out and set on the horse-block and gave a treat for Collins. I was coming up home and saw the crowd and heard the hollering and laughing, and there was Tom in the middle baling out his chestnuts and hollering at the top of his voice: ‘Come on, boys, all you Collins men, here’s a treat for Collins!’ I thought Collins would have died when he heard it. He laughed until he choked, and the next day he came to see Tom and gave him a gold eagle and a colt. He says he is going to give him a little nigger to look after it, and he’ll do it. Oh, Tom Scott’s the boy! He’ll be in the White House forty years from now. He’s making a bee-line for it right now.”

      And he bent and kissed the little fellow’s sunburnt rosy cheek.

      “His mother and his grandmother can’t do a thing with him,” he said, rapturously, “and it’s as much as I can do to manage him. Oh, he’s a case, is Tom Scott!”

      And with this tribute to his character, he left him to his slumbers, with his sturdy little legs occupying an extensive area of crib and his face resting on his small brown arm.

      After this, the Judge went to his supper and consumed a large quantity of fried chicken, waffles, and coffee, afterwards joining Tom on the porch, smoking his pipe and stigmatising Thatcher in a loud and jovial voice as the meanest man in Hamlin.

      But for this resonant jovialness of voice, his denunciation of the Democratic Party, which was not his party, might have appeared rather startling.

      “There isn’t an honest man among them,” he announced. “Not a durned one! They’re all the same. Cut each other’s throats for a dime, the whole caboodle. Oh! damn a Democrat anyhow, Tom, ’tain’t in the nature of things that they should be anything but thieves and rascals. Just look at the whole thing. It’s founded on lies and corruption and scoundrelism. That’s their foundation. They start out on it, and it ain’t reasonable to expect anything better of them. Good Lord! If I thought Tom Scott would join the Democrats, I believe I’d blow his brains out in his crib this minute.”

      Tom’s part in this discussion was that of a large-minded and strictly impartial listener. This was the position he invariably assumed when surrounded by political argument. He was not a politician. His comments upon political subjects being usually of a sarcastic nature, and likely to prove embarrassing to both parties.

      “Yes,” he said in reply to the Judge’s outpourings, “you’re right. There ain’t a chance for them, not an eternal chance. You can’t expect it, and it ain’t all their fault either. Where are they to get their decent men from, unless some of you fellows go over? Here you are without a liar or a fool among you—not a durned one—made a clean sweep of all the intellect and honesty and incorruptible worth in the country and hold on to it too, and then let out on these fellows because there isn’t any left for ’em. I’m a lazy man myself and not much on argument, but I must say that’s a weak place in your logic. You don’t give ’em a show at the start—that’s their misfortune.”

      “Oh, go to thunder!” roared the Judge, amiably. “You don’t know the first thing about it and never did. That’s where you fail—in politics. The country would be in a mighty poor fix if we had many fellows like you—in a mighty poor fix. You’re a good citizen, Tom, but you ain’t a politician.”

      “That’s so,” said Tom. “I ain’t good enough for your party or bad enough for the other, when a man’s got to be either a seraphim or a Democrat, there isn’t much chance for an ordinary fellow to spread himself.”

      Whereupon the Judge in an altogether friendly manner consigned him to thunder again and, evidently enjoying himself immensely, proceeded to the most frightful denunciations of Thatcher and his party, the mere list of whose crimes and mental incapacities should have condemned them to perdition and the lunatic asylum upon the spot without further delay.

      While he was in the midst of this genial loud-voiced harangue, his wife, who had been in the back room with the baby, came out and, on seeing her, he seemed suddenly to forget his animosities and the depraved political condition of the country altogether, becoming a placable, easily pleased, domesticated creature at once.

      “Got Nellie to sleep again, have you?” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Well, let’s go in and have some music. Come and sing ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’ That’s my favourite; it beats all the new-fangled opera things all to pieces.”

      He led the way into the parlour, which was a large square room, regarded by Barnesville as the most sumptuous of reception chambers, inasmuch as its floor was covered by a Brussels carpet adorned with exotics of multifarious colours, its walls ornamented with massively framed photographs, and its corners fitted up with whatnots and shining hair-cloth seats known in Hamlin County as “tater-tates,” and in that impressive character admired beyond expression. Its crowning glory, however, was the piano, which had belonged to Jenny Rutherford in her boarding-school days, and was the delight of the Judge’s heart. It furnished him with his most cherished recreation in his hours of repose from political conflict and argument, inasmuch as he regarded his wife’s performance seldom to be equalled and never surpassed, and the soft, pleasant voice with which she sang “The Last Rose of Summer” and other simple and sentimental melodies as that of a cantatrice whose renown might have been world-wide if she had chosen to turn her attention to its development.

      “Lord!” he said, throwing himself into one of the shining arm-chairs. “There’s nothing like music, nothing under the shining sun. ‘Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.’ ”

      This in his most sonorous quotation tones: “Let a man get tired or out of sorts, or infernal mad at a pack of cursed fools, and music’s the thing that’ll set him straight every time, if he’s any sort