to
Dartrey's mind, vacuously clever and crafty. Dartrey despised effects of
oratory, save when soldiers had to be hurled on a mark--or citizens
nerved to stand for their country.

Nesta dived into her father's brilliancy of appreciation, a trifle pained
by Dartrey's aristocratic air when he surveyed the herd of heads agape
and another cheer rang round. He smiled with her, to be with her, at a
hit here and there; he would not pretend an approval of this manner of
winning electors to consider the country's interests and their own. One
fellow in the crowded pit, affecting a familiarity with Simeon, that
permitted the taking of liberties with the orator's Christian name,
mildly amused him. He had no objection to hear 'Simmy' shouted, as Louise
de Seilles observed. She was of his mind, in regard to the rough
machinery of Freedom.

Skepsey entered the box.

'We shall soon be serious, Miss Nesta,' he said, after a look at Matilda
Pridden.

There was a prolonged roaring--on the cheerful side.

'And another word about security that your candidate will keep his
promises,' continued Simeon: 'You have his word, my friends!' And he told
the story of the old Governor of Goa, who wanted money and summoned the
usurers, and they wanted security; whereupon he laid his Hidalgo hand on
a cataract of Kronos-beard across his breast, and pulled forth three
white hairs, and presented them: 'And as honourably to the usurious Jews
as to the noble gentleman himself, that security was accepted!'

Emerging from hearty clamours, the illustrative orator fell upon the
question of political specifics:--Mr. Victor Radnor trusted to English
good sense too profoundly to be offering them positive cures, as they
would hear the enemy say he did. Yet a bit of a cure may be offered, if
we 're not for pushing it too far, in pursuit of the science of
specifics, in the style of the foreign physician, probably Spanish, who
had no practice, and wished for leisure to let him prosecute his
anatomical and other investigations to discover his grand medical
nostrum. So to get him fees meanwhile he advertised a cure for
dyspepsia--the resource of starving doctors. And sure enough his patient
came, showing the grand fat fellow we may be when we carry more of the
deciduously mortal than of the scraggy vital upon our persons. Any one at
a glance would have prescribed water-cresses to him: water-cresses
exclusively to eat for a fortnight. And that the good physician