ken of
respect, sir, from the whole of the Macclesfield Buildings Working Men's
Club, of which you was the founder, and which we hope you'll continue
for many long years to be the president _of_." And with a resounding
emphasis on the preposition, Mr. Gregson finished his speech. A
tremendous salvo of applause followed his last word, and before it had
died away a woman was hastily dragged to the front, with a child--a
blue-eyed fairy of two or three years old--in her arms. The child held a
brown paper parcel, and presented it with baby solemnity to Mr. Brooke,
who kissed her as he took it from her hands. And then, under cover of
more deafening applause, Mr. Brooke turned hurriedly to Maurice and
said, in a very unheroic manner--

"I say, I can't stand much more of this. I shall make a fool of myself
directly."

"Do: they'll like it, the beggars!" returned Maurice in high glee.

But he had more sympathy in his eyes than his words expressed, and the
grip that he gave his friend's hand set the audience once more
applauding enthusiastically. An audience of Londoners with whom a
speaker is in touch, is one of the most sympathetic and enthusiastic in
the world.

While they applauded, the parcel was opened. It contained a morocco
case, lined with dark blue satin and velvet--an unromantic and prosaic
expression of as truly high and noble feeling as ever found a vent in
more poetic ways--and on the velvet cushion lay--twelve silver spoons!

There was an odd little touch of bathos about it, and an outsider might
perhaps have smiled at the way in which the British workman and his wife
had chosen to manifest their faith in the man who had been in their eyes
wrongfully accused; but nobody present in the little assembly saw the
humorous side of it at all, not even a young gentleman who was hastily
making a sketch of it for the _Graphic_, for he blew his nose as
vigorously as anybody else. And there was a good display of
handkerchiefs and some rather troublesome coughing and choking in the
course of the afternoon, which showed that the donors of the spoons did
not look on the gift exactly in the light of a joke.

Mr. Brooke was a practised speaker; and when he opened his lips to
reply, his sister dried her eyes and put down her handkerchief with a
gratified smile as much as to say, "Now we shall have a treat." And she
settled herself so that she could watch the effect of the speech on Lady
Alice, who had forgotten to wipe her t