Since his successful raid upon the Board's accounts this gentleman had made the lives of Fotheringham and Cockshaw a burden to them. His insatiable curiosity plunged in the most ruthless manner into matters which the others knew instinctively would not bear investigation. He proposed reforms in an offhand manner which made poor Fotheringham's hair stand on end; and the very perusal of his memoranda was more than Cockshaw's industry could achieve. He had a sturdy cob on which he used to ride about in the mornings, acquiring health and strength to be disagreeable the entire day, and devising schemes of revolution as he went. Poor Cockshaw's application for the Carraways had been refused; General Beau had got the appointment and was actually in course of a series of valedictory visits to various ladies whom he believed broken-hearted at his departure. Fotheringham grew greyer and sadder day by day and prepared himself as best he might to meet the blows of fate in an attitude of dignified martyrdom. Matters at last reached a crisis in a proposal of Blunt's, brought out in his usual uncompromising fashion and thrust upon the Board, as Fotheringham acknowledged with a shudder, with a horrid point-blank directness which rendered evasion and suppression (the only two modes of dealing with questions which his experience had taught him) alike impossible. In the first place Blunt demonstrated by statistics that not enough salt was produced at the Rumble Chunder quarries to enable the inhabitants to get enough to keep them healthy. Nothing could be more convincing than his figures: so many millions of people--so many thousands of tons of salt--so much salt necessary per annum for each individual, and so forth. Then Blunt went on to show that the classes of diseases prevalent in the Sandy Tracts were precisely those which want of salt produces; then he demonstrated that there was wholesale smuggling. From all this it followed obviously that the great thing wanted was to buy up existing interests, develop the quarries, improve the roads, and increase the production. If this were done salt might be sold at a rate which would bring it within the reach of all classes, and yet the gains of Government would be increased. This was Blunt's view. The opposite party urged that to vary the salt-supply would interfere with the laws of political economy, would derange the natural interaction of supply and demand (this was one of Fotheringham's favourite phrases), would depress internal trade, paralyse existing industries, cause all sorts of unlooked-for results and not benefit the consumer a whit; and that, even if it would, ready money was not to be had at any price. Blunt, however, was not to be put off with generalities and claimed to record his opinions, that his colleagues should record theirs, and that the whole matter should be submitted to the Agent. Cockshaw gave a suppressed groan, lit a cheroot,