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But sometimes the great glad-hearted hordes of boosters do not drag down the idol in the hope of finding clay feet, but just forget him with the vast, contemptuous, heavy indifference of a hundred and twenty million people.

So felt Doctor Selig, angrily, and he planned for the end of his book a passionate resurrection of Senator Ryder. He had a shy hope that his book would appear before the Senator’s death, to make him happy.

Reading the Senator’s speeches, studying his pictures in magazine files, he felt that he knew him intimately. He could see, as though the Senator were in the room, that tall ease, the contrast of long thin nose, gay eyes, and vast globular brow that made Ryder seem a combination of Puritan, clown, and benevolent scholar.

Selig longed to write to him and ask—oh, a thousand things that only he could explain; the proposals of Lionel Sackville–West regarding Colombia; what Queen Victoria really had said in that famous but unpublished letter to President Harrison about the Newfoundland fisheries. Why couldn’t he write to him?

No! The man was ninety-two, and Selig had too much reverence to disturb him, along with a wholesome suspicion that his letter would be kicked out by the man who had once told Gladstone to go to the devil.

So forgotten was the Senator that Selig could not, at first, find where he lived. Who’s Who gave no address. Selig’s superior, Professor Munk, who was believed to know everything in the world except the whereabouts of his last-season’s straw hat, bleated, “My dear chap, Ryder is dwelling in some cemetery! He passed beyond, if I remember, in 1901. ”

The mild Doctor Selig almost did homicide upon a venerable midwestern historian.

At last, in a bulletin issued by the Anti–Prohibition League, Selig found among the list of directors: “Lafayette Ryder (form. U. S. Sen. , Sec’y State), West Wickley, Vermont. ” Though the Senator’s residence could make no difference to him, that night Selig was so excited that he smoked an extra pipe of tobacco.

He was planning his coming summer vacation, during which he hoped to finish his book. The presence of the Senator drew him toward Vermont, and in an educational magazine he found the advertisement: “Sky Peaks, near Wickley, Vt. , woodland nook with peace and a library—congenial and intellectual company and writers—tennis, handball, riding—nightly Sing round Old-time Bonfire—fur. bung. low rates. ”

That was what he wanted: a nook and a library and lots of low rates, along with nearness to his idol. He booked a fur. bung. for the summer, and he carried his suitcase to the station on the beautiful day when the young fiends who through the year had tormented him with unanswerable questions streaked off to all parts of the world and for three tremendous months permitted him to be a private human being.

When he reached Vermont, Selig found Sky Peaks an old farm, redecorated in a distressingly tea-roomy fashion. His single bungalow, formerly an honest corncrib, was now painted robin’s-egg blue with yellow trimmings and christened “Shelley. ” But the camp was on an upland, and air sweet from hayfield and spruce grove healed his lungs, spotted with classroom dust.

At his first dinner at Sky Peaks, he demanded of the host, one Mr. Iddle, “Doesn’t Senator Ryder live somewhere near here?”

“Oh, yes, up on the mountain, about four miles south. ”

“Hope I catch a glimpse of him some day. ”

“I’ll run you over to see him any time you’d like. ”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that! Couldn’t intrude!”

“Nonsense! Of course he’s old, but he takes quite an interest in the countryside. Fact, I bought this place from him and—Don’t forget the Sing tonight. ”