That Monday morning, the Monday preceding the poll, the first of the open-air meetings was held in front of the Town Hall, and quite 4,000 people from every part of London, among whom were a number of the local electors themselves, must have listened to the short declaration in which Mr. Clutterbuck, now considerably fatigued, insisted, for the twenty-seventh time, in terms with which they were now all too familiar, and in a voice increasingly raucous, upon the iniquity of the judgment he stood there to reverse, and upon the necessity of returning him to Westminster in order to effect the necessary change in the law; indeed it cannot be denied that, as the election proceeded and the excitement grew, Mr. Clutterbuck himself came greatly to exaggerate the power of a private member in directing the course of British legislation. The lengthy procedure of the House of Commons of which he had but a hazy conception, dwindled in his imagination, and as for the House of Lords, he forgot it altogether. Upon the Tuesday a football match upon Mickleton Common naturally suspended the vanity of speechmaking, and the day was given over to that hard spadework by the canvassers upon which every election finally depends. The canvassing was the more successful and the less arduous from the fact that the heads of families who were cheering upon the Common the fortunes of the Mickleton Rousers, left the ladies at home to pledge the votes of the household, which they did with a complete freedom to the emissaries of either candidate. Mr. Clutterbuck, his wife, Fitzgerald, and Mr. Maple, the agent, went the round all day till the candidate himself was fit to drop. At one place they smiled and bowed at a little group of lads who replied with glares, at another they steadily worked half a street, only to find at last that it was just outside the constituency. At a third, a seedy man, a most undoubted voter, who had been present at every meeting approached Mr. Clutterbuck and spoke a word in his ear. Mr. Clutterbuck good-naturedly proffered half a sovereign; the coin had barely changed hands when the agent--who had caught the gesture in the nick of time--pounced on the needy citizen and wrenched his fingers open by main force. The struggle was brief, and Mr. Maple--a man of stature and consequence--triumphantly returned the coin to the candidate. Whether from the wrestling or some other emotion he was trembling as he returned it. "Oh! Mr. Clutterbuck--Oh! It would have cost you your seat!" he puffed out. Mr. Clutterbuck was grateful indeed, but he heard for hours the echo of the angry borrower's blasphemy and his repeated vow to vote for that fallen angel whom an older theology has regarded as the Enemy of Mankind before he would vote National again.