In the seventies Mr.Wright had served a term as city attorney; on the other hand, Mr.Fitch had once declined the Italian ambassadorship.

Both had been mentioned at different times for the governorship or for the United States Senate, and both had declined to enter the lists for these offices.
Daniel Harwood had been graduated from Yale University a year before we first observed him, and though the world lay before him where to choose, he returned to his native state and gave himself to the study of law by day and earned a livelihood by serving the "Courier" newspaper by night.
As Mr.Harwood is to appear frequently in this chronicle, it may be well to summarize briefly the facts of his history.

He was born on a farm in Harrison County, and his aversion to farm life had been colored from earliest childhood by the difficulties his father experienced in wringing enough money out of eighty acres of land to buy food and clothing and to pay taxes and interest on an insatiable mortgage held somewhere by a ruthless life insurance company that seemed most unreasonably insistent in its collections.

Daniel had two older brothers who, having satisfied their passion for enlightenment at the nearest schoolhouse, meekly enlisted under their father in the task of fighting the mortgage.

Daniel, with a weaker hand and a better head, and with vastly more enterprise, resolved to go to Yale.