In the midst of a cold and threatening silence, Mr. Yorke got up. Never was his voice more rasping, his mouth more scornful, his glance more full of fire. “It was happy,” he said, “for one man that the Reverend Mr. John Conway was not Calvin; for, instead of being content to burn Servetus, he would first have tortured him, till even the flames would have been a relief. As for the Reverend Mr. Griffeth’s companion pictures of the country’s future, they were daubs such as no sensible man would receive as true representations, and the young man who painted them probably believed in them no more than he had believed in the precisely contrary views which he had expressed within a few years in the speaker’s own hearing. With regard to the other orators, he did not know what that illiterate and idiotic Portuguese barber had to do with the town affairs of Seaton, and he congratulated the rest on the possession of Johnny O’Brian, who had certainly been a godsend to them. So long as a shred of that devoted child was left, they would have something to say. But the reasoning in the most of the speeches to which he had listened had reminded him of the Latin of Sgarnarelle, _le médecin malgré lui_. They had put their premises in the middle ages of Europe, and their conclusion in a little New England town of the nineteenth century. ‘_Voilà ce qui fait que votre fille est muette._’ What, in fact, are we here to talk about?” He then went on to state his own views. It is said of the French legitimists under the first empire, that in their scorn of the emperor, and their determination to regard him as a foreigner, they used to pronounce his name so that it seemed to be a word of twenty syllables. Mr. Yorke had that faculty. His enunciation was clear, and the letter _r_ very prominent, and the mere pronouncing of a name he could make an insult. At first his manner had commanded silence--no one liked to be the first to hiss; but it became too scathing presently, and when one gave the first faint sound of disapproval, the storm broke out. He tried again and again to speak, but they would not hear him. Shouts and jeers arose, and cries of “Put him out! Down with him!” “Touch me if you dare!” he said, facing them, and lifting his cane. They stood aside, and he walked out, and went home, not very well pleased. CHAPTER XVI. BY THEIR FRUITS YE SHALL KNOW THEM. Mr. Yorke went home from that first town-meeting, and opened his Bolingbroke to look for a sedative. He found this: “The incivilities I meet with from opposite parties have been so far from rendering me 163 violent or sour to any, that I think myself obliged to them all. Some have cured me of fears, by showing me how impotent the world is; others have cured me of hope, by showing how precarious popular friendships are. All have cured me of surprise.”