CHAPTER XV 

Mr. Amos Cuthbert named it so--our old friend Amos who lives high up in the ether of Town's End ridge, and who now represents Coniston in the Legislature. He is the same silent, sallow person as when Jethro first took a mortgage on his farm, only his skin is beginning to resemble dried parchment, and he is a trifle more cantankerous. On the morning of that memorable day when, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came to the capital, Amos had entered the Throne Room and given vent to his feelings in regard to the gentleman in the back seat who had demanded an evening sitting on behalf of the farmers. 

"Don't that beat all?" cried Amos. "Let them have their darned woodchuck session; there won't nobody go to it. For cussed, crisscross contrariness, give me a moss-back Democrat from a one-boss, one-man town like Suffolk. I'm a-goin' to see the show." 

"G-goin' to the show, be you, Amos?" said Jethro. 

"Yes, I be," answered Amos, bitterly. "I hain't agoin' nigh the house to-night." And with this declaration he departed. 

"I wonder if he really is going?" queried Mr. Merrill looking at the ceiling. And then he laughed. 

"Why shouldn't he go?" asked William Wetherell. 

Mr. Merrill's answer to this question was a wink, whereupon he, too, departed. And while Wetherell was pondering over the possible meaning of these words the Honorable Alva Hopkins entered, wreathed in smiles, and closed the door behind him. 

"It's all fixed," he said, taking a seat near Jethro in the window. 
Who was pondering?
And while Wetherell was pondering