ous words, rose up from her chair, and stood with her
arms leaning upon the table.

"What!" said Tappitt, sitting aghast with his mouth open.

"Yes, T.; if you don't think of your family I must. What I'm saying
Mr. Honyman has said before; and indeed all Baslehurst is saying the
same thing. There's an offer made to you that will put your family on
a footing quite genteel,--no gentlefolks in the county more so; and
you, too, that are getting past your work!"

"I ain't getting past my work."

"I shouldn't say so, T., if it weren't for your own good,--and if
I'm not to know about that, who is? It's all very well going about
electioneering; and indeed it's just what gentlefolks is fit for when
they're past their regular work; And I'm sure I shan't begrudge it so
long as it don't cost anything; but that's not work you know, T."

"Ain't I in the brewery every day for seven or eight hours, and often
more?"

"Yes, T., you are; and what's like to come of it if you go on so?
What would be my feelings if I saw you brought into the house struck
down with apoplepsy and paralepsy because I let you go on in that way
when you wasn't fit? No, T.; I know my duty and I mean to do it. You
know Dr. Haustus said only last month that you were that bilious--"

"Pshaw! bilious! it's enough to make any man bilious!"

"Or any dog," he would have added, had he thought of it. Thereupon
Tappitt rushed away from his wife, back into his little office,
and from that soon made his way to the Jew's committee-room at the
Dragon, at which he was detained till nearly eleven o'clock at night.

"It's a kind of work in which one has to do as much after dinner as
before," he said to his wife when he got back.

"For the matter of that," said she, "I think the after-dinner work is
the chief part of it."

On the day of the election Luke Rowan was to be seen standing in the
High Street talking to Butler Cornbury the candidate. Rowan was not
an elector, for the cottages had not been in his possession long
enough to admit of his obtaining from them a qualification to vote;
but he was a declared friend of the Cornbury party. Mrs. Butler
Cornbury had sent a message to him saying that she hoped to see him
soon after the election should be over: on the following day or on
the next, and Butler Cornbury himself had come to him in the town.
Though absent from Baslehurst Rowan had managed to declare his
opinions before that time, and was suspected by many to hav