The legislature convenes at Austin, near the centre of the state; and, while the representative from the Rio Grande country is gathering his palm-leaf fan and his linen duster to set out for the capital, the Pan-handle solon winds his muffler above his well-buttoned overcoat and kicks the snow from his well-greased boots ready for the same journey.  All this merely to hint that the big ex-republic of the Southwest forms a sizable star on the flag, and to prepare for the corollary that things sometimes happen there uncut to pattern and unfettered by metes and bounds.

The Commissioner of Insurance, Statistics, and History of the State of Texas was an official of no very great or very small importance.  The past tense is used, for now he is Commissioner of Insurance alone.  Statistics and history are no longer proper nouns in the government records.

In the year 188—­, the governor appointed Luke Coonrod Standifer to be the head of this department.  Standifer was then fifty-five years of age, and a Texan to the core.  His father had been one of the state’s earliest settlers and pioneers.  Standifer himself had served the commonwealth as Indian fighter, soldier, ranger, and legislator.  Much learning he did not claim, but he had drank pretty deep of the spring of experience.

If other grounds were less abundant, Texas should be well up in the lists of glory as the grateful republic.  For both as republic and state, it has busily heaped honours and solid rewards upon its sons who rescued it from the wilderness.

Wherefore and therefore, Luke Coonrod Standifer, son of Ezra Standifer, ex-Terry ranger, simon-pure democrat, and lucky dweller in an unrepresented portion of the politico-geographical map, was appointed Commissioner of Insurance, Statistics, and History.

Standifer accepted the honour with some doubt as to the nature of the office he was to fill and his capacity for filling it—­but he accepted, and by wire.  He immediately set out from the little country town where he maintained (and was scarcely maintained by) a somnolent and unfruitful office of surveying and map-drawing.  Before departing, he had looked up under the I’s, S’s and H’s in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” what information and preparation toward his official duties that those weighty volumes afforded.

A few weeks of incumbency diminished the new commissioner’s awe of the great and important office he had been called upon to conduct.  An increasing familiarity with its workings soon restored him to his accustomed placid course of life.  In his office was an old, spectacled clerk—­a consecrated, informed, able machine, who held his desk regardless of changes of administrative heads.  Old Kauffman instructed his new chief gradually in the knowledge of the department without seeming to do so, and kept the wheels revolving without the slip of a cog.