prehend that Chippenden is not the pocket-borough
for Hipperdon coin. Back with him to the Mint! and, with your
permission, we will confiscate the first syllable of his name, while we
consign him to oblivion, with a hip, hip, hip, hurrah for Richmond!'

The cheers responded thunderingly, and were as loud when he answered a
'How 'bout the Dauphin?' by saying that it was the Tory hotel, of which
he knew nothing.

'A cheer for old Roy!' Edbury sang out.

My father checked the roar, and turned to him.

'Marquis of Edbury, come to the front!'

Edbury declined to budge, but the fellows round him edged aside to show
him a mark for my father's finger.

'Gentlemen, this is the young Marquis of Edbury, a member of the House
of Lords by right of his birth, born to legislate for you and me. He,
gentlemen, makes our laws. Examine him, hear him, meditate on him.'

He paused cruelly for Edbury to open his mouth. The young lord looked
confounded, and from that moment behaved becomingly.

'He might have been doing mischief to-morrow,' my father said to me, and
by letting me conceive his adroitness a matter of design, comforted me
with proofs of intelligent power, and made me feel less the melancholy
conjunction of a piece of mechanism and a piece of criticism, which I
was fast growing to be in the contemplation of the agencies leading
to honour in our land. Edbury whipped his four-in-hand to conduct our
voters to the poll. We had to pull hard against Tory interest. It was a
sharp, dubious, hot day--a day of outcries against undue influence and
against bribery--a day of beer and cheers and the insanest of tricks
to cheat the polling-booth. Old John Thresher of Dipwell, and Farmer
Eckerthy drove over to Chippenden to afford me aid and countenance,
disconcerting me by the sight of them, for I associated them with Janet
rather than with Ottilia, and it was to Ottilia that I should have felt
myself rising when the figures increased their pace in my favour,
and the yeasty mob surrounding my father's superb four-horsed chariot
responded to his orations by proclaiming me victor.

'I congratulate you, Mr. Richmond,' Dettermain said. 'Up to this day I
have had my fears that we should haul more moonshine than fish in our
net. Your father has accomplished prodigies.'

My father, with the bloom of success on his face, led me aside soon
after a safe majority of upwards of seventy had been officially
announced. 'Now, Richie,' said he, 'you