the father of the pithy thing, which he had
presented, as it happened, to Hesketh himself. The audience received
it with respect--Hesketh's own respect was so marked--but with
misapprehension; there had been too many allusions to the nobility for a
community so far removed from its soothing influence. "Had ye no friends
among the commoners?" suddenly spoke up a dry old fellow, stroking a
long white beard; and the roar that greeted this showed the sense of the
meeting. Hesketh closed with assurances of the admiration and confidence
he felt toward the candidate proposed to their suffrages by the
Liberal party that were quite inaudible, and sought his yellow pinewood
schoolroom chair with rather a forced smile. It had been used once
before that day to isolate conspicuous stupidity.

They were at bottom a good-natured and a loyal crowd, and they had not,
after all, come there to make trouble, or Mr Alfred Hesketh might have
carried away a worse opinion of them. As it was, young Murchison,
whose address occupied the rest of the evening, succeeded in making
an impression upon them distinct enough, happily for his personal
influence, to efface that of his friend. He did it by the simple
expedient of talking business, and as high prices for produce and low
ones for agricultural implements would be more interesting there than
here, I will not report him. He and Mr Farquharson waited, after the
meeting, for a personal word with a good many of those present, but it
was suggested to Hesketh that the ladies might be tired, and that he had
better get them home without unnecessary delay. Mrs Farquharson had less
comment to offer during the drive home than Hesketh thought might be
expected from a woman of her intelligence, but Miss Milburn was very
enthusiastic. She said he had made a lovely speech, and she wished her
father could have heard it.

A personal impression, during a time of political excitement, travels
unexpectedly far. A week later Mr Hesketh was concernedly accosted in
Main Street by a boy on a bicycle.

"Say, mister, how's the dook?"

"What duke?" asked Hesketh, puzzled.

"Oh, any dook," responded the boy, and bicycled cheerfully, away.

CHAPTER XXVI

Christmas came and went. Dr Drummond had long accepted the innovation
of a service on Christmas Day, as he agreed to the anthem while the
collection was being taken up, to flowers about the pulpit, and to
the habit of sitting at prayer. He was a progressive b