“At last!  About me?  You don’t mean it.”

“No—­about the lamps.  She says lamps are just what we need to complete the entrance.  She thinks Mr. Berkeley’s scheme of putting them on the stone posts is the best.  There’s more dignity about it.  Putting them on the piazza steps, she says, looks ostentatious, and suggests a beer-saloon or a road-house.”

“Well, my dear, that’s about all politics seems to amount to,” said the reformer.  “If those lamps are to be a souvenir of the campaign, they ought to suggest road-houses and beer-saloons.”

“They will not be souvenirs of a campaign,” replied Mrs. Perkins, proudly.  “They will be the outward and visible sign of my husband’s merit; the emblem of victory.”

“The red badge of triumph, eh?” smiled the candidate, wanly.  “Well, my dear, have them where you please, and keep them well filled with alcohol, even if they do burn gas.  They’ll represent the tax-payers when they get that.”

“You musn’t get so tired, Thaddeus dear,” said the little woman, smoothing his forehead soothingly with her hand.  “You seem unusually tired to-night.”

“I am,” said Thaddeus, shortly.  “The debate wore me out.”

“Did you debate?  I thought you said you wouldn’t.”

“Well, I did.  Everybody said I was afraid to meet Captain Haskins on the platform, so we had it out to-night over in the Tenth Ward.  I talked for sixty-eight minutes, gave ’em my views, and then he got up.”

“What did he say.  Could he answer you?”

“No—­but he won the day.  All he said was:  ’Well, boys, I’m not much of a talker, but I’ll say one thing—­Perkins, while my adversary, is still my friend, and I’m proud of him.  Now, if you’ll all join me at the bar, we’ll drink his health—­on me.’” Thaddeus paused, and then he added:  “I imagine they’re cheering yet; at any rate, if I have as much health as they drink—­on Haskins—­I’ll double discount old Methuselah in the matter of years.”

The next morning at breakfast the pale and nervous standard-bearer was affectionately greeted by his mother-in-law.

“I’ve been thinking about those lamps all night,” she said, after a few minutes.  “The trouble about the gate-posts is that you have three gate-posts and only two lamps.”

“Maybe they’d let us buy three lamps instead of two,” suggested Mrs. Perkins.

“Well, we won’t, even if they do let us,” observed Perkins, with some irritation.  He had just received a newspaper from a kind friend in Massachusetts with a comic biography and dissipated wood-cut of himself in it.  “I’m not starting a concert-hall, and I’m not going to put a row of lamps along the front of my place.”

“I quite agree with you,” replied his mother-in-law.  “It occurred to me we might put them, like hanging lanterns, on each of the chimneys.  It would be odd.”

Thaddeus muttered two syllables to himself, the latter of which sounded like M’dodd, but exactly what it was he said I can only guess.  Then he added:  “They won’t go there.  I can’t get a gas-pipe up through those chimneys.  It’s as much as we can do to get the smoke up, much less a gas-pipe.  Even if we got the gas-pipe through, it wouldn’t do.  A putty-blower would choke up the flues.”