seem to have been so much thrown away. You go and buy a higher-priced
cigar than you can afford, and sit and smoke it with your feet out in
the sunshine on your porch railing, and watch your neighbour's
children playing in their yard; and they look mighty nice to you; and
you feel kind, and as if everybody else was.

But that wasn't the way I felt when I helped to hand over to a
reformer the nomination for mayor; then it was just selfish
desperation and nothing else. We had to do it. You see, it was this
way: the other side had had the city for four terms, and, naturally,
they'd earned the name of being rotten by that time. Big Lafe Gorgett
was their best. "Boss Gorgett," of course our papers called him when
they went for him, which was all the time; and pretty considerable of
a man he was, too. Most people that knew him liked Lafe. I did. But he
got a bad name, as they say, by the end of his fourth term as
Mayor--and who wouldn't? Of course, the cry went up all round that he
and his crowd were making a fat thing out of it, which wasn't so much
the case as that Lafe had got to depending on humouring the gamblers
and the brewers for campaign funds and so forth. In fact, he had the
reputation of running a disorderly town, and the truth is, it
_was_ too wide open.

But _we_ hadn't been much better when we'd had it, before Lafe
beat us and got in; and everybody remembered that. The "respectable
element" wouldn't come over to us strong enough for anybody we could
pick of our own crowd; and so, after trying it on four times, we
started in to play it another way, and nominated Farwell Knowles, who
was already running on an independent ticket, got out by the reform
and purity people. That is: we made him a fusion candidate, hoping to
find some way to control him later. We'd never have done it if we