The item appeared the following evening in the _Citizen_. It was this:
"Hon. Jerome B. Garwood called upon us yesterday afternoon. The congressman is looking extremely well, despite his long and arduous duties in the Capital, and the severe heat that marks the recent season of the year at Washington. The congressman is home for the summer. Call again, Congressman."
The evening following the _Advertiser_, the organ of the opposition which, in Polk County at least, had never been called into responsibility, copied Pusey's personal item and made this comment:
"When the congressman calls again he will be wise to take the post-office with him, or something equally as substantial as that which he is said to have received over at Springfield in the long ago."
It was summer, the full flushed summer of central Illinois and the corn stood tall on the Sangamon bottoms, flashing its heavy blades in the sun. Miles and miles it spread across Logan, and Polk, and on into Moultrie County, where the Kaskaskia flows widening down to join the Mississippi at a place where the Sucker state found the picturesque beginnings of its history. There were long, calm days of scorching heat, and other days, when the clouds closed over the plains, and the humid air was too heavy to breathe. But still the corn flourished, rustling in the warm winds that blow forever across the rolling prairies, and ripened fast against the time when it should be hauled to the distilleries along the placid Illinois or stored in long cribs to await the ever-expected rise in the grain market at Chicago. Viewed from some impossible altitude, the great, green corn fields were broken here and there by smaller fields of wheat, in which some venturesome farmer reaped a little crop hardly indigenous to that black soil, and to the eastward, over the broad pastures of virgin prairie, blocky cattle browsed and fattened at their leisure. The mud roads lay deep in powdered dust, the whole land droned in the full tide of warm summer life, and men everywhere were glad, like the insects that made the throbbing air vocal with their endless shrilling, like the cattle that huddled through the long afternoons in the shade of some wind-break of slender young trees, like the corn itself forever glinting in the sun.
