t procession,
the band always playing, the tin whistles always performing; and it was
two in the morning before the occasion could in any sense be said to be
over.

Lights burned quite as late, however, in the Conservative committee
room, where matters were being arranged to bark threateningly at the
heels of victory next day. Victory looked like something that might
be made to turn and parley. A majority of seventy was too small for
finality. Her attention was called without twenty-four hours' delay to
a paragraph in the Elgin Mercury, plainly authoritative, to the effect
that the election of Mr Murchison would be immediately challenged, on
the ground of the infringement in the electoral district of Moneida of
certain provisions of the Ontario Elections Act with the knowledge and
consent of the candidate, whose claim to the contested seat, it was
confidently expected, would be rendered within a very short time null
and void.

CHAPTER XXXI

"You can never trust an Indian," said Mrs Murchison at the anxious
family council. "Well do I remember them when you were a little thing,
Advena, hanging round the town on a market-day; and the squaws coming
to the back door with their tin pails of raspberries to sell, and just
knowing English enough to ask a big price for them. But it was on the
squaws we depended in those days, or go without raspberry preserves for
the winter. Slovenly-looking things they were with their three or four
coloured petticoats and their papooses on their backs. And for dirt--!
But I thought they were all gone long ago."

"There are enough of them left to make trouble all right," said Alec.
"They don't dress up like they used to, and I guess they send the
papooses to kindergarten now; but you'll find plenty of them lying
around any time there's nothing to do but vote and get drunk."

Allowing for the natural exaggeration of partisanship, the facts about
the remaining red man of Moneida were much as Alec described them.
On market-days he slid easily, unless you looked twice, into what the
Express continues to call the farming community. Invariably, if you did
look twice, you would note that his stiff felt hat was an inch taller
in the crown than those worn generally by the farming community, the
pathetic assertion, perhaps, of an old sovereignty; invariably, too
his coat and trousers betrayed a form within, which, in the effort at
adaptation, had become high-shouldered and lank of leg. And the