Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Old Judge Priest
“Well, Hod, jest ez you say,” assented Mr. Barnhill dutifully. “I was only jest askin’, that’s all. You sort of tuck me off my feet at fust, but the way you put it now, it makes ever’thing look mighty promisin’. How about you, Wilbur?” and he turned to Mr. Bonnin.
“Oh, I’m agreeable,” chimed Mr. Bonnin. “Only don’t make any mistake about one thing – Houser’s got a-plenty friends. He’ll give us a fight all right. It won’t be any walkover.”
“I want it to be a fight, and I don’t want it to be a walk-over, either,” said Senator Maydew. “The licking we give him will be all the sweeter, then.”
He got up and started for the telephone on the wall.
“I’ll just call up and see if our man is at home. If he is, we’ll all three step over there right now and break the news to him, that the voice of the people has been lifted in an irresistible and clamorous demand for him to become their public servant at his own expense.” The Senator was in a good humour again. “And say, Hod, whilst I’m thinkin’ of it,” put in Mr. Barnhill sapiently, “ef he should be at home and ef we should go over there, tell him for Goddle Midey’s sake not to drag in that late lamentable grandpaw of his’n, more’n a million times durin’ the course of the campaign. It’s all right mebbe to appeal to the old famblies. I ain’t bearin’ ary grudge ag’inst old famblies, ‘though I ain’t never found the time to belong to one of ‘em myself. But there’s a right smart chance of middle-aged famblies and even a few toler’ble new famblies in this here community. And them’s the kind that does the large bulk of the votin’ in primary elections.”
We’ve had campaigns and campaigns and then more and yet other campaigns in our county. We had them every year – and we still do. Being what they were and true to their breeding the early settlers started running for office, almost before the Indians had cleared out of the young settlements. Politics is breath to the nostrils and strong meat to the bellies of grown men down our way. Found among us are persons who are office-seekers by instinct and office-holders by profession. Whole families, from one generation to another, from father to son and from that son to his son and his son’s son become candidates almost as soon as they have become voters. You expect it of them and are not disappointed. Indeed, this same is true of our whole state. Times change, party lines veer and snarl, new issues come up and flourish for awhile and then are cut down again to make room for newer crops of newer issues still, but the Breckinridges and Clays, the Hardins and Helms, the Breathitts and Trimbles, the Crittendons and Wickliffes, go on forever and ever asking the support of their fellow-Ken-tuckians at the polls and frequently are vouchsafed it. But always the winner has cause to know, after winning, that he had a fight.
As goes the state at large, so goes the district and the precinct and the ward. As I was saying just now, we have had warm campaigns before now; but rarely do I recall a campaign of which the early stages showed so feverishly high a temperature as this campaign between Quintus Q. Montjoy and young Tobias Houser for the Democratic nomination for State Senator. You see, beneath the surface of things, a woman’s personality ran in the undercurrents, roiling the waters and soiling the channel. Her name of course, was not spoken on the hustings or printed in the paper, but her influence was manifest, nevertheless.
There was one woman – and perhaps only one in all that community – who felt she had abundant cause to dislike Judge Priest and all that pertained to him by ties of blood, marriage, affection or a common interest. And this person was the present wife of the Hon. Horace K. Maydew, and by that same token the former wife of old Mr. Lysander John Curd. Every time she saw Congressman Dabney Prentiss passing by, grand and glorious in his longtailed coat and his broad black hat and his white tie, which is ever the mark of a statesman who is working at the trade, she harked back to that day when Judge Priest had obtruded his obstinate bulk between her husband and her husband’s dearest ambition; and she remembered that, except for him, she might now be Mrs. Congressman Maydew, going to White House receptions and giving dinners for senators and foreign diplomats and cabinet officers and such. And her thoughts grew bitter as aloes; and with rancour and rage the blood throbbed in her wrists until her bracelets hurt her. Being minded to have a part and a parcel in the undoing of the Priest plans, she meddled in this fight, giving to Mr. Montjoy the benefit of her counsel and her open, active advocacy.
Perhaps it was because he inclined a flattered ear to the lady’s admonitions rather than to her husband’s subtler chidings that Mr. Montjoy confirmed the astute Mr. Barnhill’s forebodings and refused to stand without hitching. He backed and he filled; he kicked over the traces and got tangled in the gears. He was, as it turned out, neither bridle-wise nor harness-broken. In short he was an amateur in politics, with an amateur’s faults. He took the stump early, which was all well and good, because in Red Gravel county if a candidate can’t talk to the voter, and won’t try, he might just as well fold up his tents like the Arab and take his doll rags and go on about his business, if he has any business. But against the guidance and the best judgment of the man who had led him forth as a candidate, he accepted a challenge from young Houser for a series of joint debates; and whilst Mr. Barnhill and Mr. Bonnin wagged their respective heads in silent disapproval, he repeatedly and persistently made proclamation in public places and with a loud voice, of the obligation which the community still owed his illustrious grandparent, the inference being that he had inherited the debt and expected to collect it at the polls.
It is likewise possible that Candidate Montjoy listened over-much to the well meant words of Mr. Calhoun Tabscott. This Mr. Calhoun Tabscott esteemed himself a master hand at things political. He should have been, at that. One time or another he had been on opposite sides of every political fence; other times he bestraddled it. He had been a Greenbacker, a Granger, and a Populist and once, almost but not quite, a Republican. Occasions were when, in rapid succession, he flirted with the Single Taxers, and then, with the coy reluctance of one who is half-converted, harkened to the blandishments of the Socialists. Had he been old enough he would have been either a Know-Nothing or a Whig – either or perhaps both. In 1896 he quit the Silver Democrats cold, they having obtusely refrained from sending him as a delegate to their national convention. Six weeks later he abandoned the Gold Democrats to their fate because they failed to nominate the right man for president. It was commonly believed he voted the straight Prohibition ticket that year – for spite.
In the matter of his religious convictions, Mr. Tabscott displayed the same elasticity and liberality of choice. In the rival fields of theology he had ranged far, grazing lightly as he went. When the Cumberland Presbyterians put chime bells in their spire, thereby interfering with his Sunday morning’s rest, for he lived just across the street, he took his letter out of the church and thereafter for a period teetered on the verge of agnosticism, even going so far as to buy the works of Voltaire, Paine and Ingersol combined and complete in six large volumes. He worshipped a spell with the Episcopalians and once during a space of months, the Baptists had hopes of him. Rumour had it that he finally went over to the Methodists, because old Mr. Leatheritt, of the Traders National Bank, who was a Baptist, called one of his loans.
Now, having been twice with Judge Priest in his races for the Circuit Judgeship and twice against him, Mr. Tabscott espoused the Montjoy candidacy and sat in Mr. Montjoy’s amen corner, which, indeed, was altogether natural and consistent, since the Tabscotts, as an old family, dated back almost as far and soared almost as high as the Montjoys. There had been a Tabscott who nearly fought a duel himself, once. He sent the challenge and the preliminaries were arranged but at the eleventh hour, a magnanimous impulse triumphed over his lust for blood, and for the sake of his adversary’s wife and helpless children, he decided to spare him. Mr. Tabscott felt that as between him and Mr. Montjoy a sentimental bond existed. Mr. Montjoy felt it, too; and they confabbed much together regarding ways, means and measures somewhat to the annoyance of Senator Maydew who held fast to the principle that if a master have but one man, the man should have but one master.
The first of the joint debates took place, following a barbecue, at Gum Spring School-house in the northenhost corner of the county and the second took place three days later at the Old Market House in town, a large crowd attending. Acrimony tinctured Mr. Montjoy’s utterances from the outset. Recrimination seemed his forte – that and the claims of honourable antiquity as expressed in the person of its posterity upon a grateful and remembering constituency. He bore heavily upon the fact – or rather the allegation – that Judge Priest was the head and the front of an office-holding oligarchy, who thought they owned the county and the county offices, who took what spoils of office and patronage they coveted for themselves, and sought to parcel the remainder out among their henchmen and their relatives. This political tyranny, this nepotism, must end, he said, and he, Quintus Q. Montjoy, was the instrument chosen and ordained to end it. “Nominate Montjoy and break up the County ring,” was the slogan he carried on his printed card. Therein, in especial, might be divined the undermining and capable hand of Senator Maydew. But when at the second meeting between the candidates Mr. Montjoy went still further and touched directly upon alleged personal failings of Judge Priest, one who knew the inner workings of the speaker’s mind might have hazarded a guess that here a certain lady’s suggestions, privately conveyed, found deliverance in the spoken word.
The issue being thus, by premeditated intent of one of the two gentlemen most interested, so clearly and so acutely defined, the electors took sides promptly, becoming not merely partisans but militant and aggressive partisans. Indeed, citizens who seldom concerned themselves in fights within the party, but were mainly content to vote the straight party ticket after the fighting was over, came out into the open and declared themselves. Perhaps the most typical exemplar of this conservative class, now turning radical, was offered in the person of Mr. Herman Felsburg. Until this time Mr. Felsburg had held to the view that needless interference in primary elections jibed but poorly with the purveying of clothing to the masses. Former patrons who differed with one politically were apt to go a-buying elsewhere. No matter what your own leanings might be, Mr. Felsburg, facing you across a showcase or a counter, without ever committing himself absolutely, nevertheless managed to convey the impression that, barring that showcase or that counter, there was nothing between him and you, the customer – that in all things you twain were as one and would so continue. Such had been his attitude until now.
When Mr. Montjoy speared at Judge Priest, Judge Priest remained outwardly quite calm and indifferent, but not so Mr. Felsburg. If he did not take the stump in defence of his old friend at least he frequented its base, in and out of business hours, and in the fervour of his championship he chopped his English finer and twisted his metaphors worse than ever he had done before, which was saying a good deal.
One afternoon, when he returned to the store, after a two-hours’ absence spent in sidewalk argument down by the Square, his brother, Mr. Ike Felsburg, who was associated in the firm, ventured to remonstrate with him, concerning his activities in the curbstone forum, putting the objections on the grounds of commercial expediency. At that he struck an attitude remotely suggestive of a plump and elderly Israelitish Ajax defying the lightning.
“Listen here, you Ike,” he stated. “Thirty years I have been building up this here Oak Hall Clothing Emporium, and also hats, caps and gents’ furnishings goods. You – you can run around with your lodge meetings and your benevolence societies, and all this time I work here, sweating like rats in a trap, and never is a word said by me to you, vicer or verser. I ask you as brother to brother, ain’t that so, or ain’t it? It is,” continued Mr. Herman, answering his own question.
“But, Hermy,” interjected Mr. Ike, put on the defensive by the turn which the argument had taken, “but, Hermy, all what I have said to you is that maybe somebody who likes Montjoy would get mad at you for your words and take their custom up the street.”
“Let ‘em!” proclaimed Mr. Herman with a defiant gesture which almost upset a glass case containing elastic garters and rubber armbands, “let ‘em. Anybody which would be a sucker enough to vote for Montjoy against a fine young fellow like this here Houser would also be a sucker enough to let Strauss, Coleman & Levy sell him strictly guaranteed all-wool suitings made out of cotton shoddy, and I wouldn’t want his custom under any circumstances whatsoever!”
“But, Hermy!” The protest was growing weaker.
“You wait,” shouted Mr. Herman. “You have had your say, and now I would have mine, if you please. I would prefer to get one little word in sideways, if you will be so good. You have just now seen me coming in out of the hot sun hoarse as a tiger from trying to convince a few idiots which they never had any more sense than a dog’s hind leg and never will have any, neither. And so you stand there – my own brother – and tell me I am going too far. Going too far? Believe me, Mister Ike Felsburg, I ain’t started yet.”
He swung on his heel and glared into the depths of his establishment. “Adolph,” he commanded, “come here!” Adolph came, he being head salesman in the clothing department, while Mr. Ike quivered in dumb apprehension, dreading the worst and not knowing what dire form it would assume.
“Adolph,” said Mr. Herman with a baleful side-glance at his offending kinsman. “To-day we are forming here the Oak Hall and Tobias J. Houser Campaign and Marching Club, made up of proprietors, clerks, other employees and well wishers of this here store, of which club I am the president therefrom and you are the secretary. So you will please open up a list right away and tell all the boys they are already members in good standing.”
“Well, now, Mr. Herman,” said Adolph, “I’ve always been good friends with Quintus Q. Montjoy and besides which, we are neighbours. No longer ago than only day before yesterday I practically as good as promised him my vote. I thought if you was coming out for Houser, some of us here in the store should be the other way and so – ”
Mr. Herman Felsburg stilled him with a look and removed his hat in order to speak with greater emphasis.
“Adolph Dreifus,” he said with a deadly solemnity, “you been here in this store a good many years. I would assume you like your job here pretty well. I would consider that you have always been well treated here. Am I right, or am I wrong? I am right! I would assume you would prefer to continue here as before. Yes? No? Yes! You remember the time you wrote with a piece of chalk white marks on the floor so that that poor nearsighted Leopold Meyer, who is now dead and gone, would think it was scraps of paper and go round all day trying to pick those chalk marks up? With my own eyes I saw you do so and I said nothing. You remember the time you induced me to buy for our trade that order of strictly non-selling Ascot neckties because your own cousin from Cincinnati was the salesman handling the line which, from that day to this, we are still carrying those dam’ Ascot ties in stock? Did I say anything to you then?
“No! Not a word did I say. All those things is years past and I have never spoken with you regarding them until to-day. But now, Adolph, I must say I am ashamed for you that you should pick on that poor Leopold Meyer, who was blind like a barn-door. I am ashamed for you that you should boost up that cousin of yours from Cincinnati and his bum lines. If I should get more ashamed for you than what already I now am, there is no telling what I should do. Adolph, you will please be so good as to remember that all persons that work in this here Oak Hall Clothing Emporium are for Tobe Houser for State Senator and no one else, whatsoever. Otherwise, pretty soon, I am afraid there will be some new faces selling garments around here. Do I make myself plain? I do!
“My brother – the junior partner here” – he dwelt heavily upon the word junior, making of it a most disqualifying adjective – “he also thinks in this matter the same way as I do. If you don’t believe me, ask him for yourself. There he stands like a dumb engraved image – ask him.”
And Mr. Ike, making craven surrender, raised both hands in token of his capitulation and weakly murmured, “Yes.”
The third of the joint debates, which, as it turned out, was to be the last one of the series, began according to schedule and announcement at the boat store corner in the presence of an assemblage mustering up in the hundreds. In fact the Daily Evening News reporter, in the introductory paragraph of his account, referred to it, I believe, as “a sea of upturned faces.” Mr. Montjoy led off first. He had his say, for the better part of an hour, speaking with much fluency from a small board platform that was built up against the side of the old boat store and occasionally, with a fretful shake of his head, raising his voice so it might be heard above the rumbling objurgations of the first mate of the Cumberland Queen who, thirty yards down the old gravel levee, was urging his black rousters to greater speed as they rolled the last of a consignment of tobacco hogsheads across the lower wharf boat and aboard the Queen’s boiler deck. Mr. Montjoy concluded with a neat verbal flourish and sat down, mopping his moistened brow with a square of fine cambric. Mr. Montjoy never permitted him-self to sweat and in public, at least, he perspired but seldom; but there were times when he did diffuse a perceptible glow.
His rival arose to answer him. He started off – Houser did – by stating that he was not running on his family record for this office. He was running on his own record, such as it was. Briefly, but vigorously, he defended his uncle; a thing he had done before. Continuing, he would say Mr. Montjoy had accused him of being young. He wished to plead guilty to that charge. If it were a defect, to be counted against him, time would probably cure him of it and he thought the Senate Chamber at Frankfort, this state, provided a very suitable spot for the aging process. (Laughter and applause.) He had a rather whimsical drawl and a straightforward, commonplace manner of delivery.
He continued, and I quote:
“Some of you may have heard somewhere – casually – that my opponent had a grandfather. Stories to that general effect have been in circulation for quite some little time in this vicinity. I gather from various avenues of information that my opponent is not exactly ashamed of his grandfather. I don’t blame him for that. A person without many prospects so far as the future is concerned is not to be blamed for dwelling rather heavily upon the past. But, fellow citizens, doesn’t it strike you that in this campaign we are having altogether too much grandfather and not enough grandson? (Renewed laughter from the Houser adherents and Mr. Montjoy’s face turning a violent red.) It strikes me that the stock is sort of petering out. It strikes me that the whale has bred a minnow.
“And so, in light of these things, I want to make this proposition here and now: I want every man in this county whose grandfather owned eighty slaves and four thousand acres of bottom lands to vote for Mr. Montjoy. And all I ask for myself is that every man whose grandfather didn’t own eighty slaves and four thousand acres, should cast his vote for me.” (A voice, “My grandpop never owned nary nigger, Toby, – I reckin you git my vote without a struggle, boy.”)
Along this strain Mr. Houser continued some minutes. It was a line he had not taken in either of his previous arguments with his opponent. He branched away from it to tell what he meant to do for the people of the district in the event of his nomination and election but presently he came back again to the other theme, while Judge Priest grinned up at him from his place in the edge of the crowd and Mr. Montjoy fidgeted and fumed and wriggled as though the chair upon which he sat had been the top of a moderately hot stove. From these and from yet other signs it might have been noted that Mr. Montjoy, under the nagging semihumorous goadings of young Houser, was rapidly losing his temper, which, by our awkward Anglo-Saxon mode of speech, is but another way of saying he was not losing his temper at all but, instead, finding out that he had one.
The Cumberland Queen blew her whistle for departure and as the roar died away Mr. Houser might be heard in the act of finishing a sentence touching with gentle irony upon the topic which seemed so to irk and irritate Mr. Montjoy. He never finished it.
Up, from his chair, sprang Mr. Montjoy, and shook a knotted fist beneath Mr. Houser’s nose.
“How dare you?” he demanded. “How dare you indulge in your cheap sarcasm – your low scurrilities – regarding one of the grandest men the Southland ever produced?”
His voice turned falsetto and soared to a slate-pencilly screech:
“I repeat it, sir – how dare you – you underbred ignoramus – you who never knew what it was to have a noble grandfather! Nobody knows who your grandfather was. I doubt whether anybody knows who your father – ”
Perhaps it was what Mr. Montjoy appeared to be on the point of asserting. Perhaps it was that his knuckles, as he brandished his fist in Mr. Houser’s face, grazed Mr. Houser’s cheek.
Mr. Houser stretched forth a solid arm and gripped a handful of sinewy fingers in the lapels of Mr. Montjoy’s coat. He didn’t strike Mr. Montjoy, but he took him and he shook him – oh, how he shook him. He shook him up and down, and back and forth and to and fro and forward and rearward; shook him until his collar came undone and his nose glasses flew off into space; shook him until his hair came down in his eyes and his teeth rattled in his jaw; shook him into limp, breathless, voiceless helplessness, and then holding him, dangling and flopping for a moment, slapped him once very gently, almost as a mother might slap an erring child of exceedingly tender years; and dropped the limp form, and stepped over it and climbed down off the platform into the midst of the excited crowd. The third of the series of the joint debates was ended; also the series itself.
Judge Priest instantly shoved forward, his size and his impetuosity clearing the path for him through a press of lesser and less determined bodies. He thrust a firm hand into the crook of his nephew’s arm and led him off up the street clear of those who might have sought either to compliment or to reprehend the young man. As they went away linked together thus, it was observed that the judge wore upon his broad face a look of sore distress and it was overheard that he grievously lamented the most regrettable occurrence which had just transpired and that openly he reproached young Houser for his elemental response to the verbal attacks of Mr. Montjoy and, in view of the profound physical and spiritual shock to Mr. Montjoy’s well-known pride and dignity, that he expressed a deep concern for the possible outcome. Upon this last head, he was particularly and shrilly emphatic.
In such a fashion, with the nephew striving vainly to speak in his own defence and with the uncle as constantly interrupting to reprimand him and to warn him of the peril he had brought upon his head, and all in so loud a voice as to be clearly audible to any persons hovering nearby, the pair continued upon their journey until they reached Soule’s Drug Store. There, with a final sorrowful nod of the judge’s head and a final shake of his admonishing forefinger, they parted. The younger man departed, presumably for his home to meditate upon his foolhardy conduct and the older went inside the store and retired to Mr. Soule’s little box of an office at the rear, hard by the prescription case. Carefully closing the door after him to insure privacy, he remained there for upwards of an hour, engaged undoubtedly in melancholy reflections touching upon the outbreak of his most culpable kinsman and upon the conceivable consequences. He must have done some writing, too, for when at length he emerged he was holding in one hand a sealed envelope. Summoning to him Logan Baker, Mr. Soule’s coloured errand boy, he entrusted the note to Logan, along with a quarter of a dollar for messenger hire, and sent the black boy away. From this circumstance several persons who chanced to be in Soule’s, hypothesised that very probably the judge had taken it upon himself to write Mr. Montjoy a note of apology in the name of his nephew and of himself. However, this upon the part of the onlookers was but a supposition. They merely were engaged in the old practice, so hallowed among bystanders, of putting two and two together, by such process sometimes attaining a total of four, and sometimes not.
As regards, on the other hand, Quintus Q. Montjoy, he retained no distinct recollection of the passage homeward, following his mishandling by Tobias J. Houser. For the time a seething confusion ruled his being. Mingled emotions of chagrin, rage and shame – but most of all rage – boiled in his brain until the top of his skull threatened to come right off. Since he was a schoolboy until now, none had laid so much as an impious finger upon him. For the first time in his life he felt the warm strong desire to shed human blood, to see it spatter and pour forth in red streams. The spirit of his grandfather waked and walked within him; anyway it is but fair to assume that it did so.
Somebody must have rebuttoned Mr. Montjoy’s collar for him and readjusted his necktie. Somebody else of equally uncertain identity must have salvaged his glasses and restored them to their customary place on the bridge of his slender nose. True, he preserved no memory of these details. But when, half an hour after the encounter, a hired hack deposited him at his yard gate and when Mr. Barnhill, who it would appear dimly and almost as a figment from a troubled dream, accompanied him on the ride, had dismounted and had volunteered to help him alight from the vehicle, meanwhile offering words intended to be sympathetic, Mr. Montjoy found collar, necktie and glasses all properly bestowed.
Within the sanctified and solitary precincts of his library, beneath the grim, limned eyes of his ancestor, Mr. Montjoy re-attained a measure of outward calm and of consecutive thought; coincidently with these a tremendous resolution began to harden inside of him. Presently as he walked the floor, alternately clenching and unclenching his hands, the telephone bell sounded. Answering the call, he heard coming across the line the familiar voice of one, who, in the temporary absence of her husband from the city, now undertook to offer advice. It would seem that Mrs. Maydew had but heard of the brutal assault perpetrated upon her friend; she was properly indignant and more than properly desirous that a just vengeance be exacted. It would seem in this connection she had certain vigorous suggestions to offer. And finally it would seem she had just seen the evening paper and desired to know whether Mr. Montjoy had seen his copy?
Mr. Montjoy had not. After a short interchange of views, when, from intensity of feeling, the lady fairly made the wire sibilate and sing as her words sped over it, she rang off and Mr. Montjoy summoned his butler. His was the only roof in town which harboured a butler beneath it. Other families had male servants – of colour – who performed duties similar to those performed by Mr. Mont joy’s man but they didn’t call these functionaries butlers and Mr. Montjoy did. He sent the butler out into the yard to get the paper, which a boy had flung over the fence palings in a twisted wisp. And when the butler brought it to him he opened, to read, not the Daily Evening News highly impartial account of the affair at the boat store corner – that could come later – but to read first off a card signed Veritas which was printed at the bottom of the second column of the second inside page, immediately following the editorial comment of the day. It was this card to which young Mrs. Maydew had particularly directed his attention.
He bent his head and he read. The individual who chose to hide behind the nom de plume of Veritas wrote briefly and to the point. At the outset he confessed himself as one who harboured old-fashioned ideals. Therefore he abhorred the personal altercations which in these latter and degenerate days so often marred the course of public discussions between gentlemen entertaining opposite views upon public problems or private matters. And still more did he deplore the common street brawls, not unmarked by the use of lethal weapons and sometimes by tragically fatal results to one or the other of the parties engaged, which had been known before now to eventuate from the giving and taking of the offensive word, or blow. Hardly need the writer add that he had in mind the unfortunate affray of even date in a certain populous quarter of our city. Without mentioning names, he, Veritas, took that deplorable occurrence for his present text. It had inspired him to utter these words of protest against the vulgarity, the coarseness and the crassness of the methods employed for the appeasing of individual and personal wrongs. How much more dignified, how much more in keeping with the traditions of the soil, and the very history of this proud old commonwealth, was the system formerly in vogue among gentlemen for the adjudication of their private misunderstandings! Truly enough the law no longer sanctioned the employment of the code duello; indeed for the matter of that, the law of the land had never openly sanctioned it; but once upon a time a jealous regard for his own outraged honour had been deemed sufficient to lift a Southern gentleman to extremes above the mere written letter of the statutes. “O tempora, O mores! Oh, for the good old days!” And then came the signature.
