“Just listen to this proposal,” shouted Welsh, who found that the plain sense of Lord Lamerton was producing some effect. “You hear his lordship’s magnanimous offer. He will take you honest, hearty, active mining fellows and debase you to stone-breakers by a road-side. He has had such experience in heart-breaking, that he thinks to set you a job that commends itself to his fancy—stone-breaking. But let us pass from this. I have not done with my noble lord yet. Not by any means. The last of his misdeeds is not yet quite exhausted. I want to ask the Right Honourable Baron Lamerton how it is that he is so sensitive about the tumbling down of his own house, and so ready by the hands of his Macduffs and other minions to tear down the walls of the widow’s cottage? I ask him that. See—he is confounded, he cannot answer.” Welsh looked round triumphantly. “Nor is that all,” he pursued; “I have another question to put, to which also, I have no doubt, I shall meet with silence only as an answer. His lordship who is so touchy about the rights of property is, I suspect, only touchy about the rights of his _own_ property. I have it on the best possible authority that he is threatening to dispossess a man whom we all esteem, Captain Saltren, to dispossess him of his house and land, a house built by his father and repaired and beautified by himself. I believe I am not wrong in saying that he has threatened to employ law against our valued friend, Captain Saltren.” A cry of “Shame, shame!” “Yes,” pursued the orator, “it is shame. What was that his lordship said just now about rights of property? Touch property, he insisted, and down goes trade. Who is touching property. Who but he? Who lays his envious grasp—he, Ahab, on the vineyard of the poor Naboth.” Then the orator jumped off the table, and in a changed tone said to Lord Lamerton, “I must be off and report this meeting. I’ve a train to catch. Give you a leader on it, old cock. No offence meant; none I hope taken. Both of us men of the world, and know how to live by it. I know as well as you what is gammon, but gammon is the staple diet of the chawbacon. Give us your hand.” He nudged the nobleman in the side. “Bamboozled, my lord, eh? I am James Welsh. Pretty considerably bamboozled, eh?” CHAPTER XXVI. DUMFOUNDERED. When James Welsh sprang from the table, and held out his hand, Lord Lamerton was in that condition of bamboozlement that he did not know what to do, whether to mount the table and address the audience, or to walk away; whether to accept the proffered hand, or to refuse it. He felt as does a boy who has been blindfolded and set in the midst of a room to be spun about, struck, and bidden catch his persecutors, but who finds himself unable to touch one. Whatsoever he said was caught from his lips and converted into a fresh charge against him; every kindness he proposed was perverted into an act of barbarity.