y a crowd of some 2,000 people, including
the Rector, or Vicar of the parish, who gave me godspeed on my journey
home.

This kind and sincere expression of goodwill and sympathy was worth
all the boisterous cheers with which I had been received.

On the platform at the railway station I had to make another little
speech, and then I took my seat, not for Barnstaple, but London. As
the train drew out of the station, the people clung to the carriage
like bees, and although I had not even honeyed words to give them,
they gave me a "send-off" with vociferous cheers and the most cordial
good wishes.

Thus I bade good-bye to Barnstaple, never to return or be returned,
and I can only say of that enlightened and independent constituency
that, while seeking the interests of their country, they never
neglected their own.

I need not add that I learnt a great deal in that election which
was of the greatest importance in the conduct of the Parliamentary
petitions which were showered upon me.

Before I accepted the candidature of Barnstaple, a friend of mine said
he had been making inquiries as to how the little borough of Totnes
could be won, and that the lowest figure required as an instalment to
commence with was L7,000.

After this I had no more to do with electioneering in the sense of
being a candidate, but a good deal to do with it in every other.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE TICHBORNE CASE.

[The greatest of all chapters in the life of Mr. Hawkins was the
prosecution of the impostor Arthur Orton for perjury, and yet the
story of the Tichborne case is one of the simplest and most romantic.
The heir to the Tichborne baronetcy and estates was shipwrecked while
on board the _Bella_ and drowned in 1854. In 1865 a butcher at Wagga
Wagga in Australia assumed the title and claimed the estates. But the
story is not related in these reminiscences on account of its romantic
incidents, but as an incident in the life of Lord Brampton. It is so
great that there is nothing in the annals of our ordinary courts of
justice comparable with it, either in its magnitude or its advocacy. I
speak particularly of the trial for perjury, in which Mr. Hawkins led
for the prosecution, and not of the preceding trial, in which he was
junior to Sir John Coleridge.

It is impossible to give more than the _points_ of this strange story
as they were made, and the real _facts_ as they were elicited in
cross-examination and pieced together in his