tution. We are the first in the field, and not to reap it is to
acknowledge oneself deficient in the very first instrument with which
grass was cut.'

Our difficulty all through the election was to contend with his humour.
The many triumphs it won for him, both in speech and in action, turned
at least the dialectics of the argument against us, and amusing,
flattering, or bewildering, contributed to silence and hold us passive.
Political convictions of his own, I think I may say with truth, he had
none. He would have been just as powerful, after his fashion, on the
Tory side, pleading for Mr. Normanton Hipperdon; more, perhaps: he would
have been more in earnest. His store of political axioms was Tory; but
he did remarkably well, and with no great difficulty, in confuting
them to the wives of voters, to the voters themselves, and at public
assemblies. Our adversary was redoubtable; a promising Opposition
member, ousted from his seat in the North--a handsome man, too, which
my father admitted, and wealthy, being junior partner in a City banking
firm. Anna Penrhys knew him, and treacherously revealed some of the
enemy's secrets, notably concerning what he termed our incorrigible turn
for bribery.

'And that means,' my father said, 'that Mr. Hipperdon does not possess
the art of talking to the ladies. I shall try him in repartee on the
hustings. I must contrive to have our Jorian at my elbow.'

The task of getting Jorian to descend upon such a place as Chippenden
worried my father more than electoral anxieties. Jorian wrote, 'My best
wishes to you. Be careful of your heads. The habit of the Anglo-Saxon is
to conclude his burlesques with a play of cudgels. It is his notion of
freedom, and at once the exordium and peroration of his eloquence. Spare
me the Sussex accent on your return.'

My father read out the sentences of this letter with admiring bursts
of indignation at the sarcasms, and an evident idea that I inclined to
jealousy of the force displayed.

'But we must have him,' he said; 'I do not feel myself complete without
Jorian.'

So he made dispositions for a concert to be given in Chippenden town.
Jenny Chassediane was invited down to sing, and Jorian came in her
wake, of course. He came to suffer tortures. She was obliging enough to
transform me into her weapon of chastisement upon the poor fellow for
his behaviour to her at the Ball-atrocious, I was bound to confess.
On this point she hesitated just long eno