The driver, a North countryman of sturdy temper, insisted upon knowing an exact address, but upon receiving a reply which savoured too much of carelessness about The Future Life, he whipped up his horse and drove northward as he was bid, taking, as is the invariable custom of hackney coachmen, the largest and the widest artery of the place, a street known for some centuries as the London Road, called during the eighties and nineties The Boulevard, but since the feat of arms of General Baden-Powell, characteristically and finally christened Mafeking Avenue. In this fine thoroughfare were to be discovered not a few licensed premises. Charlie Fitzgerald chose the most sumptuous of these and the best lit, stopped the cab and went in. He was about to explore the public opinion of Mickleton. He came out in a quarter of an hour, drove on to another public-house, visited it for a few minutes only, called at another and another, and so until he had fairly sampled the constituents in perhaps a dozen of those general rendezvous where the political temper of a great people may best be determined. The result of his investigation was much what he had expected, though it was more precise, and in one matter much more emphatic, than he would have premised before he began his inquiry. The populace were, as he had expected, indifferent to, and for the greater part ignorant of, the death of their respected member. Those of them who were acquainted with his demise found it difficult to keep an audience, and the few who had attempted to retail it as an entertaining item of news, were met by the coarsest of opposition, save in the case of one man, who ascribed it with conviction to murder at the hands of the police, pointing out to his companion at "The Naked Man" how many cases of such mysterious deaths had recently occurred on the Opposition side of the House, and drawing from his own rich experience of the constabulary many dark examples of their mysterious power. But while the death of the late baronet was found to have produced so little impression, one topic struck Fitzgerald's ears upon every side, and this, I need hardly say, was the case of Rex v. Fishmonger and Another. The full legal terminology was unfamiliar to these plain working men, and they alluded to it commonly as "the Nine Elms business," or the "Podger's Lay" to which the more familiar would add the term, "the Holloway job." But unvarnished and even inaccurate as were their expressions, it was clear that they were deeply moved. Save here and there in the saloon bars, where the local gentry would meet in rarer numbers, and where Fitzgerald during this tour had little concern, nothing else was talked of: most significant of all, as he rightly judged, was the ardent sympathy of the potboys, the barmaids, and the very publicans themselves, who, for all their substantial position as employers of labour, could not conceal their ardent agreement with their customers.