And here we have the mystery of the red herrings. In an earlier incarnation of the battle between fox hunters and those who considered it a barbaric sport, the animal rights advocates sometimes left red herrings in a fox's path, obscuring the scent so that the hounds were unable to stay on the right trail. Hence our term that applies to a diversion that takes one off the correct pathway to solving a problem. And in this case it was worse. It was suspected that the herrings were laced with strychnine to poison the hounds. Mr. Gotobed, ardent in his opposition to the absurd sport of hunting and killing foxes, defies the conventional wisdom of the village that knows Goarly to be a scoundrel, because he thinks any sabotage of a fox hunt is worthy of support. In this effort he fails. An ardent devotee of fox hunting, Trollope often used the hunt as a piece of the plot in his stories, and his descriptions of the sport convey the authenticity of the literate sportsman. Each of my two paperback editions of _The American Senator_ show hunt scenes on the cover. And in this novel the hunt shows us Senator Gotobed in his quixotic defense of sabotaging the sport, and Arabella Trefoil on the hunt for Lord Rufford. The world of the English gentry of which Trollope wrote was not such a large one that prominent characters from other stories might not sometimes make their appearance; and the faithful Trollope reader will smile to get a glimpse of Lady Chiltern and the Duchess of Omnium, old friends from the world of the Palliser series, as they visit the home of the Duke of Mistletoe, Arabella Trefoil's uncle. And one last bit of trivia: When Senator Gotobed presents his lecture enumerating the follies of the English, he is shouted down and some cry, "_Buncombe!_" Also spelled bunkum and sometimes shortened to bunk, this term for nonsense traveled across the Atlantic as the legacy of a congressman from North Carolina, whose district included Buncombe County, after he felt obliged to "make a speech for Buncombe" in Congress. The main plot is complicated and a bit commonplace, introduced in the first chapters that require the reader to go through with a marking pencil to identify the players, their generations, and their family relationships. The requisite dues having been paid, the reader may then go on with the story, but one is still obliged to return to these chapters for reference. Less patient generations of readers have limited tolerance of such introductions, even though some of the author's capsule comments can be quite quotable, as in this observation in describing Lawrence Twentyman: "And his farming was well done; for though he was, out-and-out, a gentleman-farmer, he knew how to get the full worth in work done for the fourteen shillings a week that he paid to his labourers--a deficiency in which knowledge is the cause why gentlemen in general find farming so very expensive an amusement."