rmers he explained that he pledged himself to give no
bribes, to spend no money and to offer no jobs, and each one of them
gripped him warmly by the hand and showed him the way to the next farm.

After the organization of the county there came the period of the public
meetings and the rallies and the joint debates between the candidates
and their supporters.

I suppose there was no place in the whole Dominion where the trade
question--the Reciprocity question--was threshed out quite so thoroughly
and in quite such a national patriotic spirit as in Mariposa. For a
month, at least, people talked of nothing else. A man would stop another
in the street and tell him that he had read last night that the average
price of an egg in New York was decimal ought one more than the price of
an egg in Mariposa, and the other man would stop the first one later in
the day and tell him that the average price of a hog in Idaho was point
six of a cent per pound less (or more,--he couldn't remember which for
the moment) than the average price of beef in Mariposa.

People lived on figures of this sort, and the man who could remember
most of them stood out as a born leader.

But of course it was at the public meetings that these things were most
fully discussed. It would take volumes to do full justice to all the
meetings that they held in Missinaba County. But here and there single
speeches stood out as masterpieces of convincing oratory. Take, for
example, the speech of John Henry Bagshaw at the Tecumseh Corners School
House. The Mariposa Times-Herald said next day that that speech would go
down in history, and so it will,--ever so far down.

Anyone who has heard Bagshaw knows what an impressive speaker he is, and
on this night when he spoke with the quiet dignity of a man old in years
and anxious only to serve his country, he almost surpassed himself. Near
the end of his speech somebody dropped a pin, and the noise it made in
falling fairly rattled the windows.

"I am an old man now, gentlemen," Bagshaw said, "and the time must soon
come when I must not only leave politics, but must take my way towards
that goal from which no traveller returns."

There was a deep hush when Bagshaw said this. It was understood to imply
that he thought of going to the United States.

"Yes, gentlemen, I am an old man, and I wish, when my time comes to go,
to depart leaving as little animosity behind me as possible. But before
I _do_ go, I want it pret