he's safe and honest and they can rely on him for _sense_. It sounds like
a simple matter; but only three or four public men in the country have
convinced us that they are like that. Hurry along, young people."

Crossing the street, they met Miss Tibbs; she was wiping her streaming
eyes with the back of her left hand and still mechanically waving her
handkerchief with her right. "Isn't it beautiful?" she said, not ceasing
to flutter, unconsciously, the little square of cambric. "There was such a
throng that I grew faint and had to come away. I don't mind your seeing me
crying. Pretty near everybody cried when he walked up to the steps and we
saw that he was lame."

Standing on the outskirts of the crowd, they could hear the mellow ring of
Harkless's voice, but only fragments of the speech, for it was rather
halting, and was not altogether clear in either rhetoric or delivery; and
Mr. Bence could have been a good deal longer in saying what he had to say,
and a thousand times more oratorical. Nevertheless, there was not a man or
woman present who did not declare that it was the greatest speech ever
heard in Plattville; and they really thought so--to such lengths are
loyalty and friendship sometimes carried in Carlow and Amo and Gaines.

He looked down upon the attentive, earnest faces and into the kindly eyes
of the Hoosier country people, and, as he spoke, the thought kept
recurring to him that this was the place he had dreaded to come back to;
that these were the people he had wished to leave--these, who gave him
everything they had to give--and this made it difficult to keep his tones
steady and his throat clear.

Helen stood so far from the steps (nor could she be induced to penetrate
further, though they would have made way for her) that only fragments