Now Mary Smith, her pleasing, energetic person, her lively eyes and dear soul, the reader can never fully know unless she has perused or rather learned by heart, that entrancing work, “Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election,” in which, like a good fairy, she plumps across the scene and is perceived to be the friend, the confidant, the cousin, the sister-in-law or the aunt of at least three-quarters of what counts in England. She will not feel, I say, unless she has made that work her bible, how from St. James’s Place Mary Smith blessed Society with her jolly little hands, and indulged in the companionship of characters as varied as the Peabody Yid and Victoria Mosel. What a woman! Her little shooting-box in Scotland! Her place in the West Country! The country house which she so rarely visited in the Midlands but which she lent in the freest manner! Her vivacity, her charm, her go, her scraps of French--her inheritance from her late husband, himself an American and Smith, as I need hardly say, by name! The reader unacquainted with the Work which I refer her to, must further have introduced to her at the proper place the notable figure of cousin William Bailey, at what an expense of repetition upon my part I need hardly say. He also was of the gang; he also had been elected of the people: but violent eccentricities now kept him apart from his true world. Thus he professed a vast interest in Jews, making them out to be the secret masters of England. How far that fanaticism was sincere, he could not himself have told you. It diverted him hugely to discover mares’ nests of every kind; he was never happier than when he was tracking the relationship between governing families or the connection of some spotless politician with a spotted financial adventure. There was but one excuse for his manias, that he remained, through the most ardent pursuit of them, a genial cynic. We shall meet him again. Mary Smith, then, was related to all of them and they were all related to each other, and in their relationship there was friendship also, and they governed England and the taxes bore them on. That the Leader of the Opposition should be Mary Smith’s close friend goes without saying; much closer and dearer to her was her other cousin, the young and popular Prime Minister, to his friends Dolly, to the world a more dignified name, who suffered slightly from his left lung. He had attained his high position before his fiftieth year was closed. For over four years he had conducted with consummate skill the fortunes of the Nationalist Party, and was at that very moment when Popocatapetl nursed so sullenly its internal rage, piloting in distant Westminster the Broadening of the Streets Bill through an excited session of Parliament.