Capitolo 90
that duration.
Man was the situation when the afternoon of Monday the
President-chosen it arrived to Washington, and the comedy started. The
New president was, almost as much as Abraham Lincoln or
Franklin Pierce, an unknown quantity in political mathematics. In
the national convention of the party, nine months before, later
of the dozens of unfruitful balls in which Ratcliffe wanted but
three votes of a majority, his/her opponents had done what he was now
doing; they had placed apart their principles and you/they had put above for them
run a simple grower in Indiana whose political experience was
limited to log-oratory in his/her native State, and to a term as
Governor. They had tarred on him, not because they thought
him competent, but because they hoped for doing so to free
Indiana from Ratcliffe is following, and they was successful
what in fifteen minutes the friends of Ratcliffe were addressed, and the
Presidency was fallen on this political and new Buddha.
He had started his/her career as a stone-cutter in an excavations, and it was, not
unreasonably, proud of the fact. During the country this accident
, you/he/she had clearly filled a great space in the public mind, or, more
precisely, in the public eye. "The Stone-cutter of the Wabash", him
you/he/she had sometimes called; to others "the Quarryman" of Hoosier but his
appellative of favourite was the "Old Granite", even if this last
affectionate name, while owing to an unlucky similarity of sound, it was
grabbed above by his/her opponents, and it distorted in the Old Grandmother."" Him
you/he/she had been painted on many thousand enclosures of cloth for cotton sheets,
or with an appalling sleigh-hammer, smashing the skulls (what
figured as pave-stones) of his/her political opponents, or dividing from
gigantic hits an enormous stone typical of the party adversary. His
opponents in their turn had illuminations of paraded that represent the
Quarryman in the attire of a breakup of prisoner of State's-jail the
heads of Ratcliffe and the other notorious political leaders with a
very weak hammer, or as her "Old Grandmother" in the rags of poor man,