before him, trying to think how it would seem to be out under the
stars.

The stillness in the Senate-Chamber was breaking; they were going
ahead with something else. It seemed to the Senator from Johnson
that sun, moon, and stars were wailing out protest for the boy who
wanted to know them better. And yet it was not sun, moon, and stars
so much as the unused swimming hole and the uncaught fish, the
unattended ball game, the never-seen circus, and, above all, the
unowned dog, that brought Senator Harrison to his feet.

They looked at him in astonishment, their faces seeming to say it
would have been in better taste for him to have remained seated just
then.

"Mr. President," he said, pulling at his collar and looking straight
ahead, "I rise to move a reconsideration."

There was a gasp, a moment of supreme quiet, and then a mighty burst
of applause. To men of all parties and factions there came a single
thought. Johnson was the leading county of its Congressional
district. There was an election that fall, and Harrison was in the
race. Those eight words meant to a surety he would not go to
Washington, for the Senator from Maxwell had chosen the right word
when he referred to the prejudice of Johnson County on the Williams
case as "undying." The world throbs with such things at the moment
of their doing--even though condemning them later, and the part of
the world then packed within the Senate-Chamber shared the universal
disposition.