was a practical farmer. They sent in fat hogs to the Missinaba County
Agricultural Exposition and the World's Fair every autumn, and Bagshaw
himself stood beside the pig pens with the judges, and wore a pair of
corduroy breeches and chewed a straw all afternoon. After that if any
farmer thought that he was not properly represented in Parliament, it
showed that he was an ass.

Bagshaw owned a half share in the harness business and a quarter share
in the tannery and that made him a business man. He paid for a pew in
the Presbyterian Church and that represented religion in Parliament. He
attended college for two sessions thirty years ago, and that represented
education and kept him abreast with modern science, if not ahead of it.
He kept a little account in one bank and a big account in the other, so
that he was a rich man or a poor man at the same time.

Add to that that John Henry Bagshaw was perhaps the finest orator in
Mariposa. That, of course, is saying a great deal. There are speakers
there, lots of them that can talk two or three hours at a stretch, but
the old war horse could beat them all. They say that when John Henry
Bagshaw got well started, say after a couple of hours of talk, he could
speak as Pericles or Demosthenes or Cicero never could have spoken.

You could tell Bagshaw a hundred yards off as a member of the House
of Commons. He wore a pepper-and-salt suit to show that he came from a
rural constituency, and he wore a broad gold watch-chain with dangling
seals to show that he also represents a town. You could see from his
quiet low collar and white tie that his electorate were a Godfearing,
religious people, while the horseshoe pin that he wore showed that his
electorate were not without sporting instincts and knew a horse from a
jackass.

Most of the time, John Henry Bagshaw had to be at Ottawa (though he
preferred the quiet of his farm and always left it, as he said, with a
sigh). If he was not in Ottawa, he was in Washington, and of course at
any time they might need him in London, so that it was no wonder that he
could only be in Mariposa about two months of the year.

That is why everybody knew, when Bagshaw got off the afternoon train
one day early in the spring, that there must be something very important
coming and that the rumours about a new election must be perfectly true.

Everything that he did showed this. He gave the baggage man twenty-five
cents to take the check off his trunk, the