at whose door he met
with an unexpected check.

"Where is your ticket?" said a large man.

"I have none," replied Mr. Lavender, disconcerted; "for this is a meeting
of the Free Speakers' League, and it is for that reason that I have
come."

The large man looked at him attentively. "No admittance without ticket,"
he said.

"I protest," said Mr. Lavender. "How can you call yourselves by that
name and not let me in?"

The large man smiled.

"Well, he said, you haven't the strength of--of a rabbit--in you go!"

Mr. Lavender found himself inside and some indignation.

The meeting had begun, and a tall man at the pulpit end, with the face of
a sorrowful bull, was addressing an audience composed almost entirely of
women and old men, while his confederates sat behind him trying to look
as if they were not present. At the end of a row, about half-way up the
chapel, Mr. Lavender composed himself to listen, thinking, "However eager
I may be to fulfil my duty and break up this meeting, it behoves me as a
fair-minded man to ascertain first what manner of meeting it is that I am
breaking up." But as the speaker progressed, in periods punctuated by
applause from what, by his experience at the door, Mr. Lavender knew to
be a packed audience, he grew more and more uneasy. It cannot be said
that he took in what the speaker was saying, obsessed as he was by the
necessity of formulating a reply, and of revolving, to the exclusion of
all else, the flowers and phrases of the leaders which during the day he
had almost learned by heart. But by nature polite he waited till the
orator was sitting down before he rose, and, with the three leaders
firmly grasped in his hand, walked deliberately up to the seated
speakers. Turning his back on them, he said, in a voice to which
nervousness and emotion lent shrillness:

"Ladies and gentlemen, it is now your turn, in accordance with the
tradition of your society, to listen to me. Let us not mince matters
with mealy mouths. There are in our midst certain viperous persons, like
that notorious gentleman who had the sulphurous impudence to have a
French father--French! gentlemen; not German, ladies-mark the cunning and
audacity of the fellow; like that renegade Labour leader, who has never
led anything, yet, if he had his will, would lead us all into the pit of
destruction; like those other high-brow emasculates who mistake their
pettifogging pedantry for pearls of price, and plaster the plain i