As the weeks flew on, fiercer and fiercer grew the fight. The Lord's Day Rest Association came to the aid of the Northampton Whigs and Tories, and posted the town with placards headed: "Do not vote for Charles Bradlaugh unless you wish to lose your Sunday rest;" other candidates for other constituencies rushed to the rescue. Mr Giffard, Q.C.--now Lord Halsbury, then the Tory candidate for Cardiff, and the all-time bitter enemy of Mr Bradlaugh--said, with that fine regard for accuracy for which he has ever been distinguished: "Mr Bradlaugh was the avowed author of a work so blasphemous that one or two boroughs had refused to have anything to do with him."[119] Mr Charles Capper, M.P., also betrayed a similar inclination towards fiction. At a public meeting in Sandwich he related that he had been "told by the hon. member for Northampton (Mr Gilpin) that the man whose name you have heard to-night, Mr Bradlaugh, stood in the Market Place of Northampton, and taking his watch from his pocket, said: 'It wants so many minutes to so-and-so. I will give you five minutes, and I call on your God, if he is your God, to strike me dead in this Market Place.' (Loud cries of 'Shame, shame.') That was Mr Bradlaugh, the man to whom Mr Mill sends his £10 to support his candidature. Can you conceive anything more wretched? Do you think if a man of that kind were to come into this town (A voice: 'Turn him out') you would not turn him out?--you would kick him out!" [Footnote 119: The latter part of this myth, at least, seems to have gained credence, for in July of this year (1894) Mr Courtney is reported to have said at Chelsea that "Mr Bradlaugh had to try constituency after constituency because he could not get a majority in any particular place."] As will be seen when I come to deal fully with this subject, Mr Capper was not absolutely the first to have the doubtful honour of reviving this ancient "watch" story, and applying it to Mr Bradlaugh, and it is hardly necessary to say of so honourable a man as Mr Gilpin that, when my father saw him on the matter, he indignantly denied that he had ever said anything of the kind. The _Primitive Methodist_[120] jubilantly remarked that "Iconoclast has been made to wince lately by the reproduction of his published opinions--very inconvenient to him at this time." My father's comment on this was that, "as a matter of fact, Mr Bradlaugh's published opinions are about the only things which have not been reproduced. His opponents prefer quoting the opinions of others, or else drawing on their imaginations." [Footnote 120: See article on "Electioneering Rowdies," October 1868, in which, with innate delicacy, it speaks of Mr Bradlaugh as "impudent."]