Another questioner, evidently thinking he had a poser, put it to the candidate: 'If war breaks out, will you be able to represent the county?' to which he returned the laconic and crushing reply: 'My man, if war breaks out, I'll be there'--an answer which at once evoked a ringing cheer and turned the meeting largely in his favour. Of course he did not convert all the miners to his way of thinking, but he managed to retain their esteem all the same. 'I like ye, Colonel, but I canna vote for ye,' said a conscientious miner to him one day, and doubtless the Colonel appreciated his humble political opponent all the more for his genuine frankness. Few who were present at his first political meeting in New Craighall schoolroom will readily forget the difficulty he had in getting through with the subject of land values. After wandering over half the Continent for practical illustrations, he at length lost the thread of his discourse, and got into a hopeless maze. For a minute or two he stood speechless, while his face became quite florid, as he fiercely pounded his left hand with his fist in his own characteristic fashion. A happy inspiration came at last. Turning his back upon the audience, he suddenly seized one of the newspaper reporters sitting near, and commanded him to stand up. 'What have you got down there? Read it!' With some difficulty the reporter obeyed. 'That's not what I want to say at all. Put it out. We can't have that go into the papers; put it down this way,' and then he proceeded to tell him what he meant to say. {117} 'I was miserably beaten,' he remarked next day to a friend; 'but I've determined to master politics, and I'll do it.' How he did it every one knows. With a volume of Gladstone's speeches in his pocket, he tramped the constituencies, and on the eve of the election, at a meeting of seventeen hundred persons in the Corn Exchange of Dalkeith, which was even honoured by the presence of cabinet ministers, the speech of the evening was admitted to be that made by Colonel Wauchope.