Such contretemps are the penalties which attend the pioneers of Science! On the whole, my electioneering experiences were not very thrilling. My opponent, Sir Philip Hazelbright, made a good stand, but he was not able to stem the flood of popular feeling. The country was tired after nine years of Tory rule, and everywhere showed the intensity of its feeling in the most unmistakable way: in more than one constituency more than half the voters on the register went to the polls. It must be admitted, too, that business losses had hit Sir Philip hard, and his side were not in a position to pay the expenses of their voters as handsomely as ours. The result was a foregone conclusion; yet it was estimated that upwards of 1,000 people assembled in front of the Town Hall to hear the two large gramophones there telling each other that they had fought the contest in a fair and sportsmanlike manner. I was recalled by serious news from home at the very instant of my triumph. Our younger son, Gervase, had contracted whooping cough severely, and was lying dangerously ill at Greylands. I should explain that in those days, before Hoscher discovered the autococcus—a discovery for which humanity will owe him a permanent debt of gratitude—it was necessary to have one’s children inoculated separately for all the leading diseases, from chicken-pox and measles to sleeping-sickness. This was usually done at the age of three, as soon as they had recovered from the tonsil and adenoid operation. Gervase’s inoculation, we now remembered, had never seemed to “take” very satisfactorily, and we bitterly regretted that we had not had it repeated. I found that Porstock had called in a chest-doctor to attend the cough, and a mind-doctor to cure the whoop; the latter, mindful of my own experiences twenty years earlier, I got rid of on the spot. He had been making the poor child sit up in bed repeating to himself, “It is very rude to hiccough in company.” We had a very anxious fortnight, and the chest-doctor, Mr. Dolman, said he thought he had never come nearer to losing a fee. But in the end our boy’s strong constitution triumphed, and a month in the Fens put him on his legs again. I must record, in connexion with this illness, a clever saying of our elder boy, Francis. Meeting Mrs. Rowlands in the hall one day while his brother was very bad, he asked “if it would be right to pray that his brother might get well.” Mrs. Rowlands, who had her views on this as on most other points, said perhaps it would be safer to pray to God that His will might be done. The first time he met her again after Gervase’s recovery he said to her very seriously, “Now, Mrs. Rowlands, ought I to thank God for doing His will?” For once, Mrs. Rowlands had to own defeat. CHAPTER XI IN PARLIAMENT