time they've sat in that chair you're sitting in--" Hawkins was out of it

instantly, and contemplating it with a reverential surprise, and with the

awed sense of having trodden shod upon holy ground--

"They!" he said.

Oh, indeed, yes, a many and a many a time."

He continued to gaze at the chair fascinated, magnetized; and for once in

his life that continental stretch of dry prairie which stood for his

imagination was afire, and across it was marching a slanting flamefront

that joined its wide horizons together and smothered the skies with

smoke. He was experiencing what one or another drowsing, geographically

ignorant alien experiences every day in the year when he turns a dull and

indifferent eye out of the car window and it falls upon a certain

station-sign which reads "Stratford-on-Avon!" Mrs. Sellers went

gossiping comfortably along:

Oh, they like to hear him talk, especially if their load is getting

rather heavy on one shoulder and they want to shift it. He's all air,

you know,--breeze, you may say--and he freshens them up; it's a trip to

the country, they say. Many a time he's made General Grant laugh--and

that's a tidy job, I can tell you, and as for Sheridan, his eye lights up

and he listens to Mulberry Sellers the same as if he was artillery.

You see, the charm about Mulberry is, he is so catholic and unprejudiced

that he fits in anywhere and everywhere. It makes him powerful good

The American Claimant