he had gone to bed, he lay awake with his eyes wide open in the
darkness, thinking of the colossal sum. If anybody should come to
_him_ and offer him all that money to vote a certain way upon a
bill, he believed he would not take it, for that would be bribery;
though Henry would be glad to have the money. Henry always needed
money; sometimes the need was imperative--once, indeed, so imperative
that the small, unfertile farm had been mortgaged beyond its value,
otherwise very serious things must have happened to Henry. Uncle Billy
wondered how offers of money to members were refused without hurting
the intending donor's feelings. And what a great deal could be done
with $1,500, if a member could get it and still be as honest as the
day is long!

About the second month of the session the floor of the House began
steadily to grow more and more tumultuous. To an unpolitical onlooker,
leaning over the gallery rail, it was often an incomprehensible
Bedlam, or perhaps one might have been reminded of an ant-heap by the
hurry-and-scurry and life-and-death haste in a hundred directions at
once, quite without any distinguishable purpose. Twenty men might be
rampaging up and down the aisles, all shouting, some of them
furiously, others with a determination that was deadly, all with arms
waving at the Speaker, some of the hands clenched, some of them
fluttering documents, while pages ran everywhere in mad haste,
stumbling and falling in the aisles. In the midst of this, other
members, seated, wrote studiously; others mildly read newspapers;
others lounged, half-standing against their desks, unlighted cigars in
their mouths, laughing; all the while the patient Speaker tapped with
his gavel on a small square of marble. Suddenly perfect calm would
come and the voice of the reading clerk drone for half an hour or
more, like a single bee in a country garden on Sunday morning.