ived, for I was
still popular in the town even among the more moderate of my opponents,
I dwelt upon Sir Thomas Colford's address to the electorate which had
just come into my hands. In this address I was astonished to see
a paragraph advocating, though in a somewhat guarded fashion, the
re-enactment of the old laws of compulsory vaccination. In a draft which
had reached me two days before through some underground channel, this
paragraph had not appeared, thus showing that it had been added by an
afterthought and quite suddenly. However, there it was, and I made great
play with it.

What, I asked the electors of Dunchester, could they think of a man
who in these modern and enlightened days sought to reimpose upon a free
people the barbarous infamies of the Vaccination Acts? Long ago we had
fought that fight, and long ago we had relegated them to _limbo_, where,
with such things as instruments of torment, papal bulls and writs of
attainder, they remained to excite the wonder and the horror of our own
and future generations.

Well would it have been for me if I had stopped here, but, led away by
the subject and by the loud cheers that my treatment of it, purposely
flamboyant, never failed to evoke, forgetful too for the moment of the
Red-headed Man, I passed on to deductions. Our opponents had prophesied,
I said, that within ten years of the passing of the famous Conscience
Clause smallpox would be rampant. Now what were the facts? Although
almost twice that time had gone by, here in Dunchester we had suffered
far less from smallpox than during the compulsory period, for at no
one time during all these eighteen or twenty years had three cases been
under simultaneous treatment within the confines of the city.

"Well, there are five now," called out a voice from the back of the
hall.

I drew myself up and made ready to wither this untruthful brawler with
my best election scorn, when, of a sudden, I remembered the Red-headed
Man, and passed on to the consideration of foreign affairs.

From that moment all life went out of my speech, and, as it seemed to
me, the enthusiasm of the meeting died away. As soon as it was over I
made inquiries, to find that the truth had been hidden from me--there
were five, if not seven cases of smallpox in different parts of the
city, and the worst feature of the facts was that three of the patients
were children attending different schools. One of these children, it was
ascertained, had be