legislatures would enjoy a better fame."


Uncle Billy had always been agitated by the sight of his name in
print. Even in the Wixinockee County _Clarion_, it dumbfounded
him and gave him a strange feeling that it must mean somebody else,
but this sudden blaze of metropolitan fame made him almost giddy. He
folded the paper quickly and placed it under his coat, feeling vaguely
that it would not do to be seen reading it. He murmured feeble answers
during the day, when some of his colleagues referred to it; but when
he reached his own little room that evening, he spread it out under
his oil-smelling lamp and read it again. Perhaps he read it twenty
times over before the supper bell rang. Perhaps the fact that he was
still intent upon it accounted for his not hearing the bell, so that
his landlady had to call him.

What he liked was the phrase: "Honest as the day is long." He did not
go to the hotel that night. He went back to his room and read the
_Constellation_. He liked the _Constellation_. Newspapers
were very kind, he thought. Now and then, he would pick up his pile of
legislative bills and try to spell through the ponderous sentences,
but he always gave it up and went back to the _Constellation_. He
wondered if Hurlbut had read it. Hurlbut had. The leader had even
told the author of the item that he was glad somebody could appreciate
the kind of a man Uncle Billy was, and his value to the body politic.

"Honest as the day is long," Uncle Billy repeated to himself, in the
little room, nodding his head gravely. Then he thought for a long
while about the member who had, according to the story, gone home with
$1,500. He sat up, that evening, until almost ten o'clock. Even after