In 1880 the Glasgow Liberals were in a great majority, and put up three candidates: Dr. Charles Cameron, proprietor of the “Glasgow Daily Mail”; Mr. Charles Middleton, of Caldwell & Middleton, and Mr. George Anderson. All three were big men physically, and were collectively dubbed “Eighteen feet of Liberalism”. The Conservatives nominated two candidates. It was the Liberals’ business to distribute their votes scientifically. This could only be done by an efficient ward organization, which would know all the Liberal voters, and instruct them to vote in the right proportions for Cameron and Middleton, for Cameron and Anderson, and for Middleton and Anderson. There was no rule against Caledonian Railway employees working according to their political consciences, in their own time; so that evenings found me, as the election approached, helping to work out the tally. The Liberal three were elected with very few votes separating each of them, and did their bit in enabling Lord Rosebery to win his bets--that he could count the Tory members among the Scottish sixty on one hand, and that they would all be able to drive into Palace Yard in the same cab. Lord Rosebery, then a young, but rapidly rising peer, was on the platform at the meeting which Gladstone addressed in the old City Hall as an accompaniment to his most wonderful Midlothian campaign. I cannot add anything to the stock of public knowledge about a very great man, but may perhaps furnish an illustration of the proverbial attention of Mrs. Gladstone to her husband, and of a forgetfulness which kept him on the level of other spectacle-using persons. Mrs. Gladstone who almost invariably accompanied her husband to his political meetings, sat next him while he was speaking with magnificent eloquence and vigour to a delighted audience, who were all standing, and were prevented from swaying dangerously by being roped off in squares, on the iniquitous support given by the Beaconsfield Government to the unspeakable Turk who had slaughtered offenseless Bulgarians, and should be cleared out of Europe, bag and baggage. The old gentleman--he was already seventy years of age--wished to read a quotation, and felt in an upper vest pocket for his spectacles. They weren’t there. He patted each vest pocket vigorously--no spectacles. Then he hunted for them, until Mrs. Gladstone quietly arose, and pulled them down from his forehead to his nose--and all was joy. To how great an extent one may seem to belong, in the eyes of a generation which is losing the use of its legs on the King’s highway, to a period almost as remote as the Flood, may be judged from the fact that, as a matter of course, after the meeting, I walked the six miles to Thornliebank, the last train having gone before the meeting was over.