He was not ready yet to make political opportunities for himself, but if political opportunities came to him, that was another matter. And they did come. When he interviewed Sir William Gatenby, he threw a pebble into a pool whose wave was to wash him to high places. It washed him into the knowledge of Mr. Charles Wattercouch, who was agent for the Division. Wattercouch read Gatenby’s letter about Sam with some surprise, as one of his recruiting grounds for voluntary workers was the Concentrics, and he thought he recalled hearing Sam speak for the other faction, but he catalogued the name for future reference on his list of earnest young men. Wattercouch, like Sam, was in no hurry. He preferred men to come to him, not to go in search of them, but Sam did not come, and a letter from Gatenby was not to be neglected. Though Gatenby had probably dismissed the subject from his mind, he paid half of Wattercouch’s salary, and he might inquire about Sam some day. So the agent called on Sam at the office. He was a square-built, square-faced man of forty, with a pink, eupeptic complexion, and light hair which bristled hardily. Your organizer of victory, like your editor, is apt to be cynical about the politics he is paid to profess, but Wattercouch kept his perfect faith in Liberalism, in spite of the fact that he served the Liberal Party, a feat in the accommodation of blameless principle with unscrupulous opportunism, which he accomplished with entire sincerity. One can be sincere and Jesuitical, in fact one can hardly be Jesuitical without being sincere, and to Mr. Wattercouch the most egregiously illiberal acts of the Liberal Party were justified because they were the acts of that party, and must, however improbable it seemed, be means to the end which was Liberalism. This is not to suggest that Mr. Wattercouch was complex, for he was indeed quite simple, as witness the man’s relish in his grotesque name. He knew the value of being ridiculed when one can turn ridicule into respect, and much of his popularity resulted from the genial way in which he took jokes about his name. He made an asset of what might, to a less good-natured man, have been a handicap. “Indeed,” says Ben Jonson, “there is a woundy luck in names, sir,” and Wattercouch turned doubtful luck to good account. Sam had the gift of the gab, which means that he knew both how and when to speak, and how and when to be silent. He was silent while Mr. Wattercouch spoke of the valuable work to be done by an earnest labourer in connection with the annual revision of the register. The point of the work was to see that all possible known Liberals were on the register, and all possible objection taken to any known Conservatives, and, complicated as the work was by the removal habit amongst electors, it was no light undertaking. Certainly no agent could have carried it through without the aid of industrious volunteers.