forward with
a resolution that he would effect an entrance. Then he was taken in
hand by two constables and pushed back through the doorway,--to the
great detriment of the apple-woman who sat there in those days.

But by pluck and resolution he succeeded in making good some inch of
standing room within the court before the Solicitor-General began his
statement, and he was able to hear every word that was said. That
statement was not more pleasing to him than to the rector of Yoxham.
His first quarrel was with the assertion that titles of nobility are
in England the outward emblem of noble conduct. No words that might
have been uttered could have been more directly antagonistic to his
feelings and political creed. It had been the accident of his life
that he should have been concerned with ladies who were noble by
marriage and birth, and that it had become a duty to him to help to
claim on their behalf empty names which were in themselves odious to
him. It had been the woman's right to be acknowledged as the wife of
the man who had disowned her, and the girl's right to be known as
his legitimate daughter. Therefore had he been concerned. But he had
declared to himself, from his first crude conception of an opinion
on the subject, that it would be hard to touch pitch and not be
defiled. The lords of whom he heard were, or were believed by
him to be, bloated with luxury, were both rich and idle, were
gamblers, debauchers of other men's wives, deniers of all rights
of citizenship, drones who were positively authorised to eat the
honey collected by the working bees. With his half-knowledge, his
ill-gotten and ill-digested information, with his reading which had
all been on one side, he had been unable as yet to catch a glimpse of
the fact that from the ranks of the nobility are taken the greater
proportion of the hardworking servants of the State. His eyes saw
merely the power, the privileges, the titles, the ribbons, and the
money;--and he hated a lord. When therefore the Solicitor-General
spoke of the recognised virtue of titles in England, the tailor
uttered words of scorn to his stranger neighbour. "And yet this man
calls himself a Liberal, and voted for the Reform Bill," he said.
"In course he did," replied the stranger; "that was the way of his
party." "There isn't an honest man among them all," said the tailor
to himself. This was at the beginning of the speech, and he listened
on through five long hours, not losing