And Mr. Miller said, "If he's at home, we'll see him—but he's away a lot."
"He lives in St. Louis?" says John.
"No," says Mr. Miller, "but not far from there. That's right, ain't it, Mitchie?"
Mitch says, "It's not very far, just up the river maybe a hundred miles, at Hannibal."
"Are you goin' up thar?" says John.
"No," says my pa, "we expect to see him in St. Louis."
Then John says: "You had a big court this time with that murder trial and all." Pa says, "Yes." "It does beat the world about the murders and things around here. More'n what there used to be, 'pears to me."
Then Mr. Miller began to talk about the Civil War and he said: "It's a bad thing for the country and will be for a long time. We got rid of slavery, but we took on a lot of bad things while doin' it. You see it killed off so many real Americans, the old stock, and in a few years with all these foreigners brought in to work at the mines and mills, the blood'll get mixed. And ideas about America will get mixed; and the country will forget what it was, and what it was meant to be; and they'll pass new laws to take care of changes. And pretty soon you won't know the country. During the war we had to part with liberties to carry on the war; and pretty soon we'll part with liberties in order to manage these new stocks. And there's a lot of corruption in the country, people gettin' rich off'n the tariff, and that'll make trouble."
John Armstrong was a Republican, and he didn't agree with Mr. Miller; but my pa says, "We'll elect Cleveland this fall and then we'll save the country."
My pa and Mr. Miller was both Democrats, but John was a Republican and they had the best of him, bein' two to one. But John says, "Why, they tell me that Cleveland wears a 6-7/8 hat and a eighteen collar and can drink more whisky than Joe Pink."