With all the resources of a brand-new cosmos at his back, a full-fledged U. P. parliamentary candidate was indeed a proposition. John Endor and his friends realized that from the start; but the character of the contest and the nature of the odds nerved them for the fight. The U. P. might weave its web, but John Endor’s transparent honesty began to gain ground in spite of all that its newspapers and its “graft” could do. Blackhampton was the exact center of England in the geographical sense and at moments of crisis in the national life, when great decisions had sometimes to be taken on inadequate premises, that fact generally reacted on the minds of its citizens. In the local idiom “they could see as far through a brick wall as most.” And in the matter of a Stunt election it was well for themselves and for the country at large that they were endowed with this faculty. Otherwise, Sir Stuyvescent Milgrim must have had a walk-over. As it was, that gentleman and those who stood behind him were soon alive to the situation. On the surface everything seemed in their favor. The arts of the U. P. were designed for such an occasion; few could hope to stand against its peculiar blend of malfeasance; but from the outset the personal equation came into play. Endor himself was a born orator; the wife he had so recently married, with her attractive presence and her quick American wits, made a brilliantly effective figure on his platform; and with the Mayor of the City, that old idol of the populace to father them, they formed a combination which in time and place was irresistible. A John Endor meeting could always put an enemy conventicle “to bed.” Nor in the matter of “sideshows,” as Sir Munt called them, was the enemy allowed to have things all his own way, as might have been the case in an agricultural constituency or a dead-alive cathedral city. Blackhampton’s Mayor, having satisfied himself as to where the truth lay, was not a man for half measures. Promptly he set his hand to the plow. And it was set in grim earnest. The first manifestation of this fact appeared in the sky. On the night of the procession by torchlight, just as the admired Sir Augustus Bimley was about to address the Charwomen of England from the plinth of John Bright’s statue, something went suddenly wrong with that huge illuminated sky sign--Endor Must Go--which made Market Square as bright as day. The Lord Bishop of Blackhampton was in the middle of his prayer when the noble illumination which the prelate had referred to as a light in a great darkness began to fizzle. By the time the prayer was at an end the light had gone out.