The challenge was taken up. By the time the speech was brought to its close a committee was selected. It consisted of a Democrat, a Republican, and a woman. Two Jersey cows, procured from a neighbouring farm, were driven on to the platform. In full view of the electors each of the contestants seated himself on a milking stool and took a pail between his legs, the orator—“spell-binder” is the Americanism—still in his frock coat, with silk hat tilted on the back of his head.
“Are you ready?” came the words.
“Go!”
The milk rattled in the bottoms of the pails. It was still rattling in the young farmer’s pail when it already had begun to swash in the “spell-binder’s,” and the latter had his cow milked dry before his opponent was half through. The meeting wound up in a blaze of glory for the victor.
That was Mr. John Barrett, the diplomatic representative of his country in Panama, who was spending his leave in electioneering. He paid his way in part through college with money he earned as a day labourer on farms during the summer. First a schoolmaster, he drifted early into journalism, with its wider opportunities, and working on San Francisco newspapers, he divined what had remained hidden from people who had spent all their lives on the Pacific coast—the opportunity that was awaiting America across that vast body of water.
I first met Mr. Barrett when he was brought to call on me in London.
Later, on an October day in 1904, I was sitting in the “Waldorf” in New York, talking to Colonel John Wier, when a man passed. He paused and whisked round.
“Mrs. Alec Tweedie,” he exclaimed. “Why, where have you come from?”
“London; and you, Mr. Barrett?”
“Panama.”