If everybody in the state house had been as good to his constituents as Jamie, Illinois would have been a very happy place in which to live. When his father died, Jamie’s mother had to take in sewing and to work hard to keep things going. She was sad much of the time, and always looked tired, and this made Jamie sad. He longed to help her, but he did not know what to do. Then a friend of theirs, Mr. Woodbridge, said he could get Jamie a place in the house as a page boy—they always say “page boy” in the legislature—and one morning Jamie’s mother dressed him in his Sunday suit and sent him up to the state house with Mr. Woodbridge.
And so he became a page. He was paid a dollar and a half a day. Every twenty days the payrolls were made out, and Jamie would go down to the treasury, sign his name in a big, round hand, “James Horn,” and then proudly take home to his mother thirty dollars in fresh, crisp, green bills! His mother had wished him to stay in school, but, of course, being a page was better than going to school. There were no books to study, and then you got out so much earlier every day! And more than all, you couldn’t take home money from school!
The house met every morning at ten o’clock, and after the speaker had taken his place under the canopy where the beautiful flag was draped, and had rapped for order, and the chaplain had prayed, the clerk would call the roll for the introduction of bills. This was Jamie’s busiest time. Everybody would have bills to introduce or petitions from his constituents to present, and for an hour Jamie would be scampering up and down the aisles between the members’ desks and the clerk’s desk. But after that he had a breathing spell, and could sit on the speaker’s steps and whisper to the speaker’s page, or look about over the house and watch the members. There were grave members from the country districts with long whiskers and steel-bowed spectacles, there were city members with fancy vests and diamonds, there were Irish members and German members, there was a Polish member named Kumaszynski, and there was a negro member, who sat away back on the Republican side almost under the galleries, and was very quiet, and wore black clothes and gold eye-glasses.
But there was one whom Jamie liked above all the others. He was tall, with smiling blue eyes that saw everything, and though his black hair was patched with gray at the temples, his face was that of a young man, clean-shaven and ruddy. He was a Chicago member and the most fashionably dressed man in the house—he wore a different suit of clothes every day. He was a lawyer and his name was Bronson Meredith. Jamie loved him the first time he ever saw him, and whenever Mr. Meredith clapped his hands Jamie would spring to his side before any other page had started, and if by chance Mr. Meredith ever gave a resolution or a bill to any of the other boys Jamie felt a twinge of jealousy at his heart.
Sometimes he would loiter an instant beside Mr. Meredith’s desk, and a smile from him made Jamie happy all that day. Jamie longed to touch him with his hand, but dared not. The only thing he could do was to pat Mr. Meredith’s overcoat, with its soft, silken lining, as it hung on its hook in the cloak-room. At night, lying in his bed, Jamie would close his eyes and see Mr. Meredith standing beside his desk, his lips slightly parted in a smile, showing his white teeth and replying so sharply to members who interrupted him that they would shoot down into their seats with red faces and all the other members would laugh, while Mr. Meredith, raising his hand, would go on with his speech, saying:
“Now, Mr. Speaker, as I was about to remark when I yielded to the perplexing question of the distinguished gentleman from Pike—”
Mr. Meredith was not often on his feet, as they say in legislative bodies, but when he took part in a debate all the other members kept still and listened with their hands behind their ears, which they didn’t do when any one else spoke. Mr. Meredith was a leader—many called him a reformer. Jamie decided that when he grew up he would be a lawyer, a leader and a reformer.
Now, when the session was about over there was a bill in the house which almost all the Chicago members hoped to see made into a law; but Mr. Meredith was against it. The country members, too, for the most part, were against the bill, and Jamie noticed that when it first came over from the senate there was a stir in the house, and that every time it came up, after that, all the members would rush in from the cloak-rooms, or the lobbies, or the supreme court library, or the rotunda of the state house, to speak about it and to vote on it.
Jamie did not understand the bill, or know what it was for; he only knew that it was something about a franchise in Chicago, and that every week a party of rich-looking gentlemen would come down to Springfield and stand about in the house, or sit on the big red lounge behind the speaker’s chair, and whisper and try to get men to vote for it.
And Jamie knew, too, that it was called senate bill No. 578; he impressed that number firmly on his mind and could never forget it. He soon observed that on any day when he saw S. B. 578 on the calendar—which is a kind of program printed every morning to tell what bills are coming up—Mr. Meredith would be on his feet and make motions and speeches, and that the gentlemen on the speaker’s red lounge would scowl at him and the other city members try to answer him. And Jamie noticed that Mr. Meredith always succeeded in having the bill referred back to some committee, or did something to keep it from becoming a law.