consecutive weeks, and examined half the
voters in the town; but it made sharp work, and reported to the
Speaker of the House such a tale of continual corruption, that all
the world knew that the borough would be disfranchised. The glory
of Percycross was gone, and in regard to political influence it was
to be treated as the cities of the plain, and blotted from off the
face of existence. The learned gentlemen who formed the Commission
had traced home to Mr. Griffenbottom's breeches-pockets large sums
of money which had been expended in the borough for purposes of
systematised corruption during the whole term of his connection
with it;--and yet they were not very hard upon Mr. Griffenbottom
personally in their report. He had spent the money no doubt, but
had so spent it that at every election it appeared that he had not
expected to spend it till the bills were sent to him. He frankly
owned that the borough had been ruinous to him; had made a poor man
of him,--but assured the Commission at the same time that all this
had come from his continued innocence. As every new election came
round, he had hoped that that would at least be pure, and had been
urgent in his instructions to his agents to that effect. He had at
last learned, he said, that he was not a sufficient Hercules to
cleanse so foul a stable. All this created no animosity against him
in Percycross during the sitting of the Commission. His old friends,
the Triggers, and Piles, and Spiveycombs, clung to him as closely as
ever. Every man in Percycross knew that the borough was gone, and
there really seemed at last to be something of actual gratitude
in their farewell behaviour to the man who had treated the place
as it liked to be treated. As the end of it all, the borough was
undoubtedly to be disfranchised, and Mr. Griffenbottom left it,--a
ruined man, indeed, according to his own statement,--but still with
his colours flying, and, to a certain extent, triumphantly. So we
will leave him, trusting,--or perhaps rather hoping,--that the days
of Mr. Griffenbottom are nearly at an end.

His colleague, Sir Thomas, on the occasion of his third visit to
Percycross,--a visit which he was constrained to make, sorely against
his will, in order that he might give his evidence before the
Commission,--remained there but a very short time. But while there he
made a clean breast of it. He had gone down to the borough with the
most steadfast purpose to avoid corruption; and had