In a moment the situation, so flattering to Senator Hanway, was changed disastrously.
Those winds which builded him into the most imposing sand-cone of all that dotted the plains of party had shifted, and with mournful effect.
Senator Hanway, beneath their erosive influence, shrunk from a certainty to a probability, from a probability to a possibility, and then wholly disappeared.

And this disheartening miracle was worked before the eyes of Senator Hanway, and before the eyes of his friends; and yet no one might stay the calamity in its fulfillment.

The amazing story, avoiding simile and figure, may be laid open in a handful of sentences.
On that dread day, which you are to keep in memory, nothing could have been brighter than the prospects of Senator Hanway.

The national delegates, some nine hundred odd, had been selected--each State naming its quota--and waited only the appointed hour to come together and frame the party's ticket.

By count of friend and foe alike, Senator Hanway was certain of convention fortune; he was the sure prognostication for the White House of all the prophets.
And because the last is ever the first in the memory of a forgetful age, and therefore the most important, that which particularly contributed to the strength of Senator Hanway was his project of a Georgian Bay-Ontario Canal.