"Come now," said the member, "that's splendid: that will help
enormously. Honesty and public morality! The very thing! If Drone runs
and makes a good showing, we win for a certainty. Tompkins, you must
lose no time over this. Can't you manage to get some articles in the
other papers hinting that at the last election we bribed all the voters
in the county, and that we gave out enough contracts to simply pervert
the whole constituency. Imply that we poured the public money into this
county in bucketsful and that we are bound to do it again. Let Drone
have plenty of material of this sort and he'll draw off every honest
unbiased vote in the Conservative party.

"My only fear is," continued the old war horse, losing some of his
animation, "that Drone won't run after all. He's said it so often
before and never has. He hasn't got the money. But we must see to that.
Gingham, you know his brother well; you must work it so that we pay
Drone's deposit and his campaign expenses. But how like Drone it is to
come out at this time!"

It was indeed very like Edward Drone to attempt so misguided a thing as
to come out an Independent candidate in Missinaba County on a platform
of public honesty. It was just the sort of thing that anyone in Mariposa
would expect from him.

Edward Drone was the Rural Dean's younger brother,--young Mr. Drone,
they used to call him, years ago, to distinguish him from the rector.
He was a somewhat weaker copy of his elder brother, with a simple,
inefficient face and kind blue eyes. Edward Drone was, and always had
been, a failure. In training he had been, once upon a time, an engineer
and built dams that broke and bridges that fell down and wharves that
floated away in the spring floods. He had been a manufacturer and
failed, had been a contractor and failed, and now lived a meagre life as
a sort of surveyor or land expert on goodness knows what.

In his political ideas Edward Drone was and, as everybody in Mariposa
knew, always had been crazy. He used to come up to the autumn exercises
at the high school and make speeches about the ancient Romans and Titus
Manlius and Quintus Curtius at the same time when John Henry Bagshaw
used to make a speech about the Maple Leaf and ask for an extra half
holiday. Drone used to tell the boys about the lessons to be learned
from the lives of the truly great, and Bagshaw used to talk to them
about the lessons learned from the lives of the extremely rich. Drone
used to