Читать книгу The 13th District. A Story of a Candidate онлайн

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McFarlane liked to recall to his friends his six months in the State House, and spoke at times in the language of the bills he had enrolled and engrossed so often during that experience.

“Well, a lawyer that tries his own case has a fool for a client,” said Mason, “and it’s that-away ’ith a candidate that manages his own campaign.”

Bromley had been led to his resolution to take the stump by two incidents. One, the first, occurred at Chicago. He had gone there to attend a banquet of the State Bar Association, and had made a speech. Though he had been accustomed to the court room all his life, and had spoken much to juries, and oftener to courts, he was deliberative and judicial, rather than epideictic, and had acquired the dry, sophistical manner of speaking which comes to those happy and distinguished lawyers whose causes are heard with more sympathy by the solemn judges of the courts of appeal, than by the juries in the nisi prius courts, and he had shrunk from popular oratory.

But at the bar banquet, having drunk wine, he spoke at length, and as he progressed so loved the sound of his own voice, that when he sat down he found himself for the first time in his life in an oratorical perspiration. And then, before the flush of his intellectual activity had left him, ideas more brilliant than those he had had while on his feet came to him in such profusion that he had longed to repeat his effort. He felt that he could do so much better, though he felt that he had done well, for the long board, sweeping away with its glistening glass, and surrounded by so many ruddy men in brave shirt-fronts, had run round with applause. To crown his triumph the man next to him had said: