St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1885-03-14
sPOONER OF WISCONSIN.
The Host Peculiar Looking Member of the
Senate.

Senate.
Wash. Cor. of the Post-Dispatch.
The oddest-looking addition to the senate
comes from Wisconsin. His name is
Spooner. He is the successor to Angus
Cameron, who served out Matt Carpenters
unexpired term. He occupies Senator Gull
loln's old seat upon the short back row be-
hind the main body of the Republican sena-
tors seats. There have been before in the
senate gnificant-looking men, but never
one who has approached Spooner in this re-
gard. 1t is the custom of the clerks and mes
sengers about the senate, when they are in
the senate chamber waiting for orders, to
drop into any Of the vacant seats that there
may happen to be in the back rows. Spoon
ers position gives him the appearance of a
messenger waiting to carry some bundle.
| There is not one OF the messengers or clerks
who does not look to be more of a man than
he. He is not bit over five feet six inches
in height, and would not weigh over 100
pounds. This would not be enough to make
him look conspicuousy inferior among the
tall men in the senate if he had q good
| sized head, one even in proportion to his
small body. Senator Vest is a small man,
but he has large head, full of character,
and as he sits at his desk compares very
favorably with those about him. Spooner's
head is grotesque in its smallness. His face
is almost weakened in its thinness and sharp
ness of line. The lower part of his face
runs to a sharp point. His eyes are small
and deeply sunk. His nose is a sloping,
thin and straight. His mouth is very large.
His hair is a thick, sandy red, which is
brushed up as if with wisp broom from his
right ear, and brushed smooth into d solid
bank of hair which stands out at right angles
from the left side of his head, completely
covering the left ear. The hair upon the
back side of his head is also brushed to this
central point. He has the appearance of
having been out in a very high gale of wind,
and of having had his hair frozen stiff when
the wind was blowing at its highest
gauge of velocity. Invouutarily, as
one looks at Spooner, he thinks
of his windward and leeward sides.
Underneath this widely blown mass of hair
his naturally small face becomes SO reduced
through contrast, that nothing but a photo
graph would make any one believe in the
real absurdity of his appearance. Over this
small face there steals, whenever he is adj
dressed, the shrewd smirk of the village
w
squares his legs and slips his hands into his
trousers pockets, after the fashion of the
leader in the village gossip in the leading
grocery stores of Hudson, Wis, his home.
He has been a useful little man about Madi
son, where he has been a number of years
employed by the railroad interests of that
state. He is said to be an attorney with good
railroad practice and has some reputation for
skill and legal knowledge. He was sent to
the senate by the railroad corporations who
have employed him in the past. He
is in the senate to-day as the messenger boy
of these corporations. If he should wear
a little square cap with the gold band Of
these corporations about it he would look much
better than he does posing as an actual Unit
ed States senator, sitting there as the legiti-
mate successor Of the great Matt Carpenter,
the foremost lawyer of his age, the most pic
turesquely handsome man of his time, and
one of the most graceful, most persuasive,
most convincing and eloquent orators ever
known in the senate of the United States.
Matt Carpenter had an exquisite sense of the
ludcrous. Some of his most maddening
satircai thrusts would be preceded by funny
little chuckle, if his opponent presented too
wide front Of absurdity. If there is such
thing as spirits returning to this world, | can
imagine Matt Carpenter standing on the
senate floor and chucBling in the perfection
OF humorous delight over this representative
which Wisconsin has sent to fill his place.
Spooner may be a great man, but he never
could prove it by any circumstantial evidence
which has thus far been developed.