any possible encore of the boorish performance which had just disturbed the amenities of the dining-room; and in order to provide against any risk of its recurrence she took possession of Mr. Greville for the rest of the evening, and privately instructed all her lady subalterns to overwhelm Mr. Shoddy with snubs should he again venture on the forbidden ground of local politics. All these precautions, though not taken with that intention, effectually prevented any tête-à-tête between Jem and Greville. Sir Henry, carrying out his plan of preventing if possible any such collision, organised an expedition for the next morning, when Augustus and Greville were to start after an eight o'clock breakfast to an outlying property, fifteen miles off, for three days' snipe-shooting, on the plea of refreshing Charles after his electioneering labours.

CHAPTER XI.

MAXWELL saw clearly, not only from the events of yesterday's dinner party but by many other indications, that the sooner he left the Grange the better for everybody's comfort. Notwithstanding, therefore, Mr. Pinchum's apparent indifference as to his personal canvass of his future constituents, and in spite of the active remonstrances of Mr. Gregory, who was reluctant to part with his patient, Jem determined to commence at once his domiciliary visitation of Shamboro'. And though Sir Henry expressed the hope that he would still consider the Grange as his head-quarters, he very naturally felt that under existing circumstances, and being, as he thought, rather more than convalescent, the proffered extension of hospitality must be declined. Jem therefore took his leave of his kind hosts, his movements being rather quickened by finding that there was no longer any chance for him of a symposium with Charles, who had been already packed off on his shooting expedition. The Maxwell family being absent from home on a round of visits, Jem drove at once into Shamboro', and betook himself to his old quarters at the Maxwell Arms.' To those who have experienced the miseries and humiliations incident to a Parliamentary canvass, the record of Jem's sufferings during the next fortnight would be but the renewal of an unutterable sorrow. With his arm in a sling, dragged about from street to street and from alley to alley by a couple of attorneys, a publican, and an enthusiastic Oxford undergraduate, and followed everywhere by a tribe of little urchins holloaing for the 'Buffs,' poor Jem, long before the two first days of his self-imposed penance were over, began heartily to despise both his wire-pullers and himself. But he knew that, as his father said, he was 'in for it;' and was he not an apostle of Civil and Religious Liberty?' The people about him might be humbugs, the material with which they had to deal might be coarse, the language they taught him to use might be

cause was at stake all means of supporting it were lawful, and, as Mr. Pinchum constantly reminded him, in war, love, and elections, everything was fair.' By reasonings such as these, Mr. Maxwell had reduced himself before the end of his week's canvass to the low level of his committee. Among the operatives and mechanics he was not only the working man's friend, but a working man himself,' prepared favourably to consider any measure that might be introduced into Parliament for giving free action to trades-unions. Among the capitalists he was convinced that the prosperity of all classes depended on the prompt suppression of all unlawful combinations.' When canvassing the licensed victuallers, Jem was opposed to any 'injudicious and futile attempts to make men sober by Act of Parliament.' When propitiating the teetotallers, he was convinced that no vested interests would long be permitted to interfere with those restrictions on the sale of intoxicating liquors which the well being of the people required to be enforced.' When the ritualist vicar of St. James's, in whose eyes the Privy Council and its judgments bore all the marks of the Beast of the Apocalypse, plaintively asked when the Church was to be emancipated from the galling fetters of Parliamentary control, and expressed a hope that the candidate would aid in achieving its freedom,' Jem reminded the vicar that among his most ardent supporters he counted the Liberationists, who though they might not regard Church questions from the vicar's point of view, yet aimed at the same practical result, of severance of Church and State.

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When the rector of Trinity, in whose ear the faintest whisper of Disestablishment sounded as the echo of the crack of doom, expressed a hope that come what might, our glorious Constitution in Church and State would be preserved,' Jem pointed to the preamble of his address in which he figured as an attached member of the Church of England.' And thus it came to pass that by an ingenious perversion of the Apostolic precept, the versatile Jem became all things to all men' in Shamboro', and if anybody had asked him after his fortnight's canvass to give a reason of the political faith that was in him, he could have conscientiously replied that he had no faith at all. No disciple of Ignatius Loyola was ever more passively submissive to his master than Jem to Pinchum. Trust me not at all, or all in all,' would have been the motto of the latter had he been a student of the Poet Laureate. As it was, he silenced any remaining scruples of Jem's as to the means by which the great end of the election was being attained by the simple injunction Leave those things to me.' The Liberal committee, consisting of half a dozen tradesmen, the Unitarian minister, and the landlord of the Maxwell Arms,' ably seconded Pinchum's laissez-faire policy, declaring that they themselves knew no more of electioneering than the Man in the Moon,' an expression not quite so forcible as it seemed to be, considering that the last-named gentleman had been for some time at work in

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the unconscious candidate who now seemed to be in a fair way towards the attainment through these loathsome influences of that 'share in the great work of Government' which Dr. Arnold had told him was the highest earthly desire of the ripened mind.'

CHAPTER XII.

On the grey November morning which had been fixed by the returning officer for the nomination at Shamboro', Gertrude, whose anxious anticipation of the coming event was perhaps the more oppressive and painful to herself because it was studiously concealed from others, gazed from the library window at Pinchbeck Park on the turbulent sky. It presented a too faithful reflection of her own thoughts. The two brief and, in some respects, unromantic interviews with Mr. Greville, at the Grange and in Stanhope Street, had given a fresh current to her meditations. In fact, Gertrude, though she did not admit it to herself, was in love. And the exulting tone in which all around her at Mr. Richardson's had for two months past foretold their coming party triumph-the insolent allusions to one who in proportion as he was reviled became more and more the idol of her heart, had intensified the affection which consumed her. And she now thought herself prepared to bear anything or to brave anything which she might be called upon to suffer or to do. But there was one thing which she could not do, and that was to grace that portion of the ladies' gallery at the nomination which was allotted to the opponents of her hero. Just as she had arrived at this determination, the gentlemen who had been waiting for her in the breakfast-room with some impatience rushed into the library.

'Well, Gerty,' shouted her uncle, what are you dreaming about here? No tea made-no breakfast ready, and we've all to be at Shamboro' in half an hour; for heaven's sake, girl, look alive!'

Roused from her reveries, poor Gertrude flew into the breakfastroom without a word, and in less than fifteen minutes the carriage drove up to the door, and the mantelpiece clock warned the punetual Mr. Richardson that it was time to be off.

'But you haven't got your things on-of course you're going with us,' said he hastily to Gertrude.

'No; please let me stay at home-I can't be of any use,' pleaded she sadly.

'Nonsense; put on your cloak and come along. Why, your pretty face will be half the battle won on our side; we won't let you off, I can tell you,' half angrily responded Mr. Richardson.

Knowing by experience her uncle's temper, and the practical inconveniences of resisting it, Gertrude reluctantly complied, rushed upstairs for her cloak and bonnet, and in three minutes was in the carriage which drove rapidly to the town. Mrs. Richardson, being seriously indisposed, was not of the party.

The streets of Shamboro' were in a state of unusual bustle and excitement. What with the country people thronging in to the nomination, the preparations for to-morrow's polling, and the knots of rowdies clustered here and there in groups in evident anticipation of a shindy, and the cautious shopkeepers who were protecting their plate glass against possible contingencies by closing their sabbatical shutters, all things betokened that an appeal to the people' was at hand.

As Mr. Richardson's carriage passed the Liberal head-quarters on its way to the Guildhall, a cheer was raised by a group of partisans with yellow favours who were standing in the street, and was responded to by gracious bows.

A division of the county police lined the approaches to the Guildhall. Gertrude was escorted to the ladies' gallery without difficulty through the crowd, while the gentlemen fought their way into the body of the hall as best they could to the hustings erected at the further end.

As the hall scarcely held more, even with very close packing, than a tenth of the electors, and the space allotted to the magnates (including the candidates and their proposers and seconders, and the representatives of the press) was most inconveniently wasted by the architectural arrangements, subdividing the area into jury and witness boxes and all the paraphernalia of the Assizes, which were always held there, the upper ten at Shamboro' had to go through rather a scramble for standing room on nomination days.

The Rev. Elias Stiggins, who had been selected as the seconder of one of the Liberal candidates, was among the unsuccessful combatants for admission to the inner precincts of the hall. Jammed in at the entrance among a knot of local roughs, to whom the disestablishment of churches was of less consequence than their own personal establishment in front of the hustings, poor Stiggins' lines could scarcely be said to have fallen in pleasant places on this eventful morning.

The returning officer called 'Silence' and rang his little bell alternately, but all in vain. For full half an hour after the time fixed for the nomination, neither voice nor bell could be heard above the uproar. At last, after a threat to adjourn the proceedings altogether, followed by a simultaneous movement on the part of the leaders on both sides towards a back exit from the hustings, a peculiar cat-call, which was, no doubt, a preconcerted signal for a truce among the roughs, whistled shrilly through the din, and was followed by a sudden silence. Thereupon the mayor returned to his post, and business began in earnest.

The candidates were, as usual, proposed and seconded in the order in which they had issued their addresses. Barker and Jem accordingly came first, followed by Dibbs and Greville. The silence which had been purchased by the mayor's threat of adjournment was

declaring that he would be an Hornament to the 'Ouse, and would put an hend to the himperious and hinsufferable rule of a dominant Church,' the Dibbsites loudly commanded him to shut up,' and the remaining sentences of his oration were lost to the world. The same fate awaited the proposers and seconders who followed, and it must be said in favour of the Sham boro' lambs that their bleatings were very evenly distributed, and greeted in turn all the political shepherds who attempted to gather them into their fold.

When the time came for the candidates themselves there was again a slight lull in the storm, which, when Mr. Barker announced in a stentorian voice that he had travelled 12,000 miles from the Antipodes to secure the emancipation of Shamboro' from the thraldom of Mr. Dibbs,' swelled into a tempestuous cheer. And when Mr. Dibbs in his turn had recalled to the recollection of his audience his 'first entry into their ancient town, a hungry and penniless orphan, fifty years ago,' and had declared, with his broad hand on his blue. waistcoat, that the present was the proudest moment of his life,' a non-elector shouted "'ear, 'ear!' and called upon the Dibbsites to wave their "atts' and clap their "'ands,' and give three times three for their fellow-townsman.' Jem who, after consulting all his uncle's Parliamentary friends and some of his own contemporaries, had adopted all their recipes for speech cooking, and had not only written out his own performance thrice, but had recited it thrice in the looking glass, and had learnt by heart the three last paragraphs, was yet not quite up to the mark when his turn came, and needed all the encouragement of his admiring friends to nerve him for the occasion.

'Gentlemen' (he said, or was afterwards reported to have said) Electors of Shamboro'. It is at your own invitation that I stand before you to-day as the champion of a cause dear not only to ourselves but to our common country. My honourable friend Mr. Barker has told you that his mission is to emancipate your borough. If by your favour I enter the House of Commons, my higher aim will be to emancipate the British nation, trodden down through six centuries alternately by the iron heel of despotism and the degrading influences of a corrupt oligarchy. "Peace, retrenchment, and reform," gentlemen, are our watchwords. Standing armies are the invention of despots. A Colonial Empire is the contrivance of an effete aristocracy to provide a billet for their degenerate offspring To relieve the Bishops from attendance at the House of Lords, and to relieve the House of Lords itself of its functions altogether, unless they shall be discharged in a more effective manner, will form a part of my duties if elected as your representative. The extravagant foreign policy of Mr. Pitt, only too faithfully copied by his successors, has entailed on the hardy sons of toil in this tax-ridden country intolerable burdens from which it will be my earnest effort to set them free, by a large reduction of our naval and military establishments, and by a readjustment of taxation which shall compel the owners of real property to bear the full penalty of their past political