will only go close enough."

For all his soberness of humor and choleric upheavals, Mr. Hawke,
because of his record as a House leader and a tariff maker--he had
tinkered together that identical bill which, when Senator Hanway later
revamped it in the Senate, produced the Obstinate One as a Governor--was
the legitimate heir to the Speakership; and in the House, where
tradition is something sacred and custom itself the strongest of
arguments, his defeat for the place was thereby rendered well-nigh
impossible. Senator Hanway had undertaken no child's task when he went
about the gavel elevation of the popular, yet--by House usage--the
illegitimate Mr. Frost.

Months before ever Senator Hanway was granted the honor of knowing Mr.
Gwynn, he had been burrowingly busy about the Speakership. As a primary
step he was obliged to suppress his ebullient brother-in-law. Mr.
Harley, the moment a conquest of the House in the interests of Senator
Hanway was proposed, waxed threateningly exuberant. He was for issuing
forth to vociferate and slap members upon their backs and jovially
arrange committeeships on the giffgaff principle of give us the
Speakership and you shall become a Chairman. The optimistic Mr. Harley,
whose methods were somewhat coarse and who did most things with an ax,
was precisely of that hopeful sort who would advertise an auction of the
lion's hide while it was yet upon the beast. Senator Hanway, with
instincts safer and more upon the order of the mole's, forbade such
campaigns of noise.

"You must keep silent, John," said he, "and never let men know what we
are about. You are inclined, apparently, to regard a Speakership as you
might a swarm of bees; you think one has only to beat a tin pan long