he
air hold any hint of beer. Where it had an alcoholic drift the flavour
was of whisky; but the stimulant of the occasion had been tea or cider,
and the room was full of patient good will.

The preliminaries were gone through with promptness; the Chair had
supped with the speakers, and Mr Crow had given him a friendly hint that
the boys wouldn't be expecting much in the way of trimmings from HIM.
Stamping and clapping from the back benches greeted Mr Farquharson.
It diminished, grew more subdued, as it reached the front. The young
fellows were mostly at the back, and the power of demonstration had
somehow ebbed in the old ones. The retiring member addressed his
constituents for half an hour. He was standing before them as their
representative for the last time, and it was natural to look back and
note the milestones behind, the changes for the better with which he
could fairly claim association. They were matters of Federal business
chiefly, beyond the immediate horizon of Jordanville, but Farquharson
made them a personal interest for that hour at all events, and there
were one or two points of educational policy which he could illustrate
by their own schoolhouse. He approached them, as he had always done on
the level of mutual friendly interest, and in the hope of doing mutual
friendly business. "You know and I know," he said more than once; they
and he knew a number of things together.

He was afraid, he said, that if the doctors hadn't chased him out of
politics, he never would have gone. Now, however, that they gave him no
choice, he was glad to think that though times had been pretty good for
the farmers of South Fox all through the eleven years of his appearance
in the political arena, he was leaving it at a moment when they promised
to be better still. Already, he was sure, they were familiar with the
main heads of that attractive prospect and, agreeable as the subject,
great as the policy was to him, he would leave it to be further unfolded
by the gentleman whom they all hoped to enlist in the cause, as his
successor for this constituency, Mr Lorne Murchison, and by his friend
from the old country, Mr Alfred Hesketh. He, Farquharson, would not take
the words out of the mouths of these gentlemen, much as he envied them
the opportunity of uttering them. The French Academy, he told them, that
illustrious body of literary and scientific men, had a custom, on the
death of a member and the selection of his successor