oumistan division. The
candidate of the Young Turkish Party was known to be three or four
hundred votes ahead, and he was already drafting his address, returning
thanks to the electors. His victory had been almost a foregone
conclusion, for he had set in motion all the approved electioneering
machinery of the West. He had even employed motorcars. Few of his
supporters had gone to the poll in these vehicles, but, thanks to the
intelligent driving of his chauffeurs, many of his opponents had gone to
their graves or to the local hospitals, or otherwise abstained from
voting. And then something unlooked-for happened. The rival candidate,
Ali the Blest, arrived on the scene with his wives and womenfolk, who
numbered, roughly, six hundred. Ali had wasted little effort on election
literature, but had been heard to remark that every vote given to his
opponent meant another sack thrown into the Bosphorus. The Young Turkish
candidate, who had conformed to the Western custom of one wife and hardly
any mistresses, stood by helplessly while his adversary's poll swelled to
a triumphant majority.

"Cristabel Columbus!" he exclaimed, invoking in some confusion the name
of a distinguished pioneer; "who would have thought it?"

"Strange," mused Ali, "that one who harangued so clamorously about the
Secret Ballot should have overlooked the Veiled Vote."

And, walking homeward with his constituents, he murmured in his beard an
improvisation on the heretic poet of Persia:

"One, rich in metaphors, his Cause contrives
To urge with edged words, like Kabul knives;
And I, who worst him in this sorry game,
Was never rich in anything but--wives."

JUDKIN OF THE PARCELS

A figure in an indefinite tweed suit, carrying brown-paper parcels. That
is what we met suddenly, at the bend of a muddy Dorsetshire lane, and the
roan mare stared and obviously thought of a curtsey. The mare is
road-shy, with intervals of stolidity, and there is no telling what she
will pass and what she won't. We call her Redford. That was my first
meeting with Judkin, and the next time the circumstances were the same;
the same muddy lane, the same rather apologetic figure in the tweed suit,
the same--or very similar--parcels. Only this time the roan looked
straight in front of her.

Whether I asked the groom or whether he advanced the information, I
forget; but someway I gradually reconstructed the life-history of this
trudger of the