He
squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window ledge
where he could watch the men come in and find seats.
As Caxton's one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a
living and a kind of standing in the town's life. To be a newsboy or a
bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in
the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great men
and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day
likely to become such a figure? Is it not a duty we of the town owe to
future greatness that we push him forward? So reasoned the men of Caxton
and paid a kind of court to the boy who sat on the window ledge of the
hall while the other boys of the town waited on the sidewalk below.
John Telfer was chairman of the mass meeting. He was always chairman of
public meetings in Caxton. The industrious silent men of position in the
town envied his easy, bantering style of public address, while pretending
to treat it with scorn. "He talks too much," they said, making a virtue of
their own inability with apt and clever words.
Telfer did not wait to be appointed chairman of the meeting, but went
forward, climbed the little raised platform at the end of the hall, and
usurped the chairmanship.
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