"CANDIDATES IN COLLISION"
"Handsome Woman Candidate and Aristocratic Aspirant for Mayoralty Flee from Joint Debate, only to Crash Together in the Woods and Return in Electric Cab Together."
A portion of the article ran as follows:
"For weeks the advocates of higher education for women and the shriekers for female suffrage who have been pushing the daughter of the late Senator Van Deusen forward in her attempt to become Mayor of Roma, have been laboring to arrange a joint debate in which their candidate should take the platform and discuss the issues of our city campaign with that scion of would-be American Royalty, Jack Allingham. They have left no stone unturned to interest the public in this expected clash of argument and trial of brain-power. (We refrain from commenting here upon the minimum quantity of the latter necessary to such a debate.) Finally they had, with great flourish of trumpets and beating of drums—(we are speaking politically, not literally now)—arranged for such a debate on the very evening before election day.
"Last night Brocklebank Hall was crowded with the usual audience of mixed social position and nationality in attendance at mass-meetings of the Republican and Independent parties in Roma. They had gathered to hear the accumulated perorations of wit and wisdom on the part of their two candidates. They were to decide, finally, which one to vote for today; to make up their little minds whether to put into the mayor's chair a stiff, conservative aristocrat who cares no more for the laboring classes of Roma than he does for its work-horses—(or its mules) or a young woman of good ancestry, but no actual knowledge of municipal affairs—only an inherited cock-sureness of opinion on any and every subject that may come up.
"Did they hear this great joint debate?
"No. Why? Because during the hours while the impatient audience were beguiled by feeble arguments from mushroom speakers, who attempted to amuse them while they waited, the principal actors in this farce were miles away, chasing each other about in electric cabs, which at a distance of twenty miles or more from Brocklebank Hall collided and threw the aspiring occupants out in a deep wood. Thus doth fate pursue the over-ambitious and wreck their plans.
"When the chauffeurs returned from the farmhouse whence they had gone for help in extricating their machines, Allingham, the aristocrat, lay prone on the ground with his head in the lap of her who had been his whilom opponent for the mayor's chair. A sight fit for the gods, truly—and also for the voters of Roma.
"The couple, erstwhile at swords' points, but now tucked cosily together in one electric cab, were later brought back to Roma at one o'clock in the morning—she none the worse for her skillful evasion of the platform contest, and he with a slight scalp wound only, to show that he had been worsted.