y general, as far as the
criers went. They put on their Sabbath face concerning the declaration of
war, and told with approval how the Royal hand had trembled in committing
itself to the form of signature to which its action is limited. If there
was money to be paid, there was a bugbear to be slain for it; and a
bugbear is as obnoxious to the repose of commercial communities as rivals
are to kings.

The cry for war was absolutely unanimous, and a supremely national cry,
Everard Romfrey said, for it excluded the cotton-spinners.

He smacked his hands, crowing at the vociferations of disgust of those
negrophiles and sweaters of Christians, whose isolated clamour amid the
popular uproar sounded of gagged mouths.

One of the half-stifled cotton-spinners, a notorious one, a spouter of
rank sedition and hater of aristocracy, a political poacher, managed to
make himself heard. He was tossed to the Press for morsel, and tossed
back to the people in strips. Everard had a sharp return of appetite in
reading the daily and weekly journals. They printed logic, they printed
sense; they abused the treasonable barking cur unmercifully. They printed
almost as much as he would have uttered, excepting the strong salt of his
similes, likening that rascal and his crew to the American weed in our
waters, to the rotting wild bees' nest in our trees, to the worm in our
ships' timbers, and to lamentable afflictions of the human frame, and of
sheep, oxen, honest hounds. Manchester was in eclipse. The world of
England discovered that the peace-party which opposed was the actual
cause of the war: never was indication clearer. But my business is with
Mr. Beauchamp, to know whom, and partly understand his conduct in
after-days, it will be as well to take a bird'seye glance at him through
the war.

'Now,' said Everard, 'we shall see what staff there is in that fellow
Nevil.'

He expected, as you may imagine, a true young Beauchamp-Romfrey to be
straining his collar like a leash-hound.

CHAPTER IV

A GLIMPSE OF NEVIL IN ACTION

The young gentleman to whom Everard Romfrey transferred his combative
spirit despatched a letter from the Dardanelles, requesting his uncle not
to ask him for a spark of enthusiasm. He despised our Moslem allies, he
said, and thought with pity of the miserable herds of men in regiments
marching across the steppes at the bidding of a despot that we were
helping to popularize. He certainly wrote in the tone of a j