flagellated. The English duke is Mr. Cullen's
bugbear; never a speech from Mr. Cullen but that duke is most horribly
mauled. His ground rents,--yah! Another word of which Mr. Cullen is
fond is 'strattum,'--usually spelt and pronounced with but one t midway.
You and I have the misfortune to belong to a social 'strattum' which is
trampled flat and hard beneath the feet of the landowners. Mr. Cullen
rises to such a point of fury that one dreads the consequences--to
himself. Already the chairman is on his feet, intimating in dumb show
that the allowed ten minutes have elapsed; there is no making the orator
hear. At length his friend who sits by him fairly grips his coat-tails
and brings him to a sitting posture, amid mirthful tumult. Mr. Cullen
joins in the mirth, looks as though he had never been angry in his life.
And till next Sunday comes round he will neither speak nor think of the
social question.

Mr. Cowes is unopposed. After the preceding enthusiast, the voice of
Mr. Cowes falls soothingly as a stream among the heather. He is tall,
meagre, bald; he wears a very broad black necktie, his hand saws up
and down. Mr. Cowes' tone is the quietly venomous; in a few minutes you
believe in his indignation far more than in that of Mr. Cullen. He makes
a point and pauses to observe the effect upon his hearers. He prides
himself upon his grammar, goes back to correct a concord, emphasises
eccentricities of pronunciation; for instance, he accents 'capitalist'
on the second syllable, and repeats the words with grave challenge to
all and sundry. Speaking of something which he wishes to stigmatise as a
misnomer, he exclaims: 'It's what I call a misnomy!' And he follows the
assertion with an awful suspense of utterance. He brings his speech to
a close exactly with the end of the tenth minute, and, on sitting down,
eyes his unknown neighbour with wrathful intensity for several moments.

Who will follow? A sound comes from the very back of the room, such a
sound that every head turns in astonished search for the source of it.
Such voice has the wind in garret-chimneys on a winter night. It is a
thin wail, a prelude of lamentation; it troubles the blood. The speaker
no one seems to know; he is a man of yellow visage, with head sunk
between pointed shoulders, on his crown a mere scalp-lock. He seems to
be afflicted with a disease of the muscles; his malformed body quivers,
the hand he raises shakes paralytic. His clothes are of the mean