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Still subtler is the seven-foot ballot of stupid, good intentions the hyperdemocratic ballot in which you are asked to vote for the State Printer, and succeed only in voting under the party emblem. Statistics then is no automatic device for measuring facts. You and I are forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker.
And the change has reacted on American society. The mother has come once more to the front, and even if she is obliged to own to forty-five years to the census-taker, she has again the position and the privileges of the blooming woman of thirty. That this change is the deliberate work of the American Girl, no one who knows her grace and talent will deny.
One after another of her pets passed away and was replaced, the yellow cur barked his last currish signal, the cat died and her kittens came to various ends of time or casualty, the crow fell away to dust and was too old to stuff, and the garden bloomed and faded ten times over, before Miss Manners found herself to be forty-six years old, which she heroically acknowledged one fine day to the census-taker.
It still claimed 1300 inhabitants as estimated and engraved on the stone court-house by the census-taker in 1597. The citizens were a mixture of Indians and other Indians; but some of 'em was light-colored, which I was surprised to see. The town was huddled up on the shore, with woods so thick around it that a subpoena-server couldn't have reached a monkey ten yards away with the papers.
Henry McGinnis came to him and asked straight out for a job as federal census-taker on the ground that he was hard up and had been crippled with rheumatism all winter. Nelson Williamson asked for the post of wharf master on the plea that he had been laid up with sciatica all winter and was absolutely fit for nothing.
"Uncle Eli," said Hamilton suddenly, "since I'm going to be a census-taker, I think I'd like to apply for this district." The old Kentucky mountaineer, who had been steadily working his way through the weekly paper, lowered it so that he could look over the top of the page, and eyed the boy steadfastly. "What for?" he queried.
The tension would have been relieved if our faces were all set towards extinction, and the speedy evacuation of this unsatisfactory globe. The writer met recently, in the Colorado desert of Arizona, a forlorn census-taker who had been six weeks in the saddle, roaming over the alkali plains in order to gratify the vanity of Uncle Sam.
She had no hammer at hand; so she seized a large stone that lay near by and pounded at the board till the twice-tinkling bell recalled her to the house, and as soon as she had made confession to the census-taker she went back, alas, too late! Piggy had redoubled his efforts, another board had yielded, and he was free! What a thing freedom is! how objectionable in practice, how splendid in theory!
When the firing ceased a six-year-old boy descended the ladder and, approaching the Governor, remarked unconcernedly: "You can go in now. They're all dead." Then Rogers called up the census-taker and told him to go ahead with his enumeration. The provincial treasurer, Captain Link, is a lean, lithe South Carolinian who has spent fifteen years in Moroland.
As for his occupation when the census-taker, with a wink to the boys in the store, had asked him what it was, he had said, in that same odd tone: "Putties up glass a little white-washes a little " and, when the man had made a show of writing all that down, "preaches a little." He might have said "preaches a big," for you could hear him half a mile away. The foreman was a retired sea-captain.
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