which marched evenly with the brick-and-terra-cotta fronts in Texas Street
and the American-Tudor cottages of the suburbs, it was a creditable relic.
The auditorium was well filled in pit, dress-circle and gallery when Kent
and his guest edged their way through the standing committee in the foyer;
but by dint of careful searching they succeeded in finding two seats well
around to the left, with a balcony pillar to separate them from their
nearest neighbors.

Since the public side of American politics varies little with the
variation of latitude or longitude, the man from the East found himself at
once in homely and remindful surroundings. There was the customary draping
of flags under the proscenium arch and across the set-piece villa of the
background. In the semicircle of chairs arched from wing to wing sat the
local and visiting political lights; men of all trades, these, some of
them a little shamefaced and ill at ease by reason of their unwonted
conspicuity; all of them listening with a carefully assumed air of
strained attention to the speaker of the moment.

Also, there was the characteristic ante-election audience, typical of all
America--the thing most truly typical in a land where national types are
sought for microscopically: wheel-horses who came at the party call; men
who came in the temporary upblaze of enthusiastic patriotism, which is
lighted with the opening of the campaign, and which goes out like a candle
in a gust of wind the day after the election; men who came to applaud
blindly, and a few who came to cavil and deride. Loring oriented himself
in a leisurely eye-sweep, and so came by easy gradations to the speaker.

Measured by the standard of fitness for his office of prolocutor the man
standing beside the stage-properties speaker's desk was worthy a second
glance. He was dark, undersized, trimly built; with a Vandyke beard