“Yes.”
“Then we’ll leave it to you. Only beware of making too many statements. You’ll get dates and places from the committee as soon as they are settled. We pay twenty-five dollars a night. If you hit the right key, we may want you in some of the other wards, too.”
“I shall be glad to talk. It’s what I’ve been doing to small crowds in the saloons.”
“So I’m told. You’ll never get a better place. Men listen there, as they never will at a mass-meeting.” Costell rose. “If you are free next Sunday, come up into Westchester and take a two o’clock dinner with me. We won’t talk politics, but you shall see a nice little woman, who’s good enough to make my life happier, and after we’ve looked over my stables, I’ll bring you back to the city behind a gray mare that will pass about anything there is on the road.”
So Peter had a half day in the country and enjoyed it very much. He looked over Mrs. Costell’s flower-garden, in which she spent almost her whole time, and chatted with her about it. He saw the beautiful stables, and their still more beautiful occupants. He liked the couple very much. Both were simple and silent people, of little culture, but it seemed to Peter that the atmosphere had a gentle, homely tone that was very pleasing. As he got into the light buggy, he said to Mrs. Costell:
“I’ll get the seed of that mottled gillyflower from my mother as soon as possible. Perhaps you’ll let me bring it up myself?”
“Do,” she said. “Come again, whether you get the seed or not.”
After they had started, Mr. Costell said: “I’m glad you asked that. Mrs. Costell doesn’t take kindly to many of the men who are in politics with me, but she liked you, I could see.”
Peter spoke twice in the next week in small halls in his ward. He had good audiences, and he spoke well, if simply.
“There ain’t no fireworks in his stuff,” said the ward satirist. “He don’t unfurl the American flag, nor talk about liberty and the constitution. He don’t even speak of us as noble freemen. He talks just as if he thought we was in a saloon. A feller that made that speech about the babies ought to treat us to something moving.”