It is astonishing how many excellent devices, and how many grand projects and schemes of lofty usefulness, are marred by inattention to detail, or it may be the want of a single but essential ingredient. This was nearly the case on the present occasion. My Great Electioneering Trick had almost failed from an oversight in its initiation. We had, up to this moment, retained no lawyer or attorney,--a most essential feature of such a plot as that we had engaged in. This omission was discovered by me just in time to be filled up. We heard of an attorney--a low sort of fellow, I believe--who lived in the neighbourhood. I hired him, and sent him down with the other two to the borough of N---- that night. I parted company with my friends at the Euston Station. They proceeded a little more than a hundred miles to the populous town of H---- by railway, and there alighted. From this point the journey was performed in a lumbering post-chaise, as I had desired my party not on any account to arrive at the town of N---- before twelve o'clock at night. I preferred that it should be a little after one in the morning, and I suggested they might as well get up a little sensation on their arrival. This I told them might easily be done, by a pretended anxiety to keep their arrival dark and quiet. My instructions herein were obeyed, as I afterwards ascertained, with unerring exactness. There was, at a very short distance on the outside of the town, a toll-bar, always locked at night, and the keeper of which was not renowned for his vigilance or wakefulness. The party found a trifle of real difficulty in gaining admission to the borough. It was some time before the man at the toll-house, rubbing his eyes, opened his little wicket, and came forth to unlock the gate. As he did so, he was startled by the sight of a vehicle with three persons in it, and heavily laden. The man's sagacity penetrated, as he thought, the whole secret. He winked, and nodded, and grinned significantly. He saw in one of the party another candidate for the franchise of the free and independent electors; and in the other two his agents. His acute vision dived through the keyhole of that box, and there beheld a weight of gold, which he defined, in conversation next day, as "such a sight as he never saw in his life before even at an election." My man kept up the delusion well, by throwing two half-crowns to the fellow; and each of his companions tossed a handful of small coin at him, as he closed the gate after them. Away rolled, at a slow pace, the heavily-laden vehicle, the horses throbbing and panting, and the riders chuckling to their hearts' content.