possible. Perhaps you'll let me bring it up myself?"

"Do," she said. "Come again, whether you get the seed or not."

After they had started, Mr. Costell said: "I'm glad you asked that. Mrs.
Costell doesn't take kindly to many of the men who are in politics with
me, but she liked you, I could see."

Peter spoke twice in the next week in small halls in his ward. He had
good audiences, and he spoke well, if simply.

"There ain't no fireworks in his stuff," said the ward satirist. "He
don't unfurl the American flag, nor talk about liberty and the
constitution. He don't even speak of us as noble freemen. He talks just
as if he thought we was in a saloon. A feller that made that speech
about the babies ought to treat us to something moving."

That was what many of the ward thought. Still they went because they
wanted to see if he wouldn't burst out suddenly. They felt that Peter
had unlimited potentialities in the way of eloquence (for eloquence to
them meant the ability to move the emotions) and merely saved his
powers. Without quite knowing it they found what he had to say
interesting. He brought the questions at issue straight back to
elementary forms. He showed just how each paragraph in the platform
would directly affect, not the state, but the "district."

"He's thoroughly good," the party leaders were told. "If he would abuse
the other side a little more, and stick in a little tinsel and calcium
light he would be great."