for him, skilful "setter-up" though he were, to put properly on end. He saw this after five minutes' conversation with his local representative, Mr. Teesdale, and saw that there was an end of his chance, so far as Brocksopp was concerned. "It won't do here, Teesdale," he said; "this finishes our business It hasn't looked very promising throughout, but if this old character had gone to the poll, and specially if he had said one or two things you could have crammed him with on the nomination day, we might have pulled through! You see he's so eminently respectable, and though he, of course, is not to be compared with this young chap that Potter and Fyfe's people have got hold of--and where they dug him up astonishes me! Newspaper office, eh? 'Gad, we haven't got much of that sort of stuff in the newspaper offices of our party-I'm not sure that we couldn't have got him in. They'd have had the show of hands and the hurraying and all that; but we know how much that's worth, and what with Sir George Neal's people and our own, we could have run him deuced close, even if we didn't win. Nuisance it is, too, for he's kept us from running anybody else. There was young Clare, Sir Willis Clare's eldest son, was up in Pall Mall the other day, ready to go in for anything, and with rather a hankering for this place, which his father sat for once; but I said we were booked, and now--confound it!" Mr. Teesdale was scarcely less upset. He talked vaguely of getting Mr. Creswell's consent, so soon, as he was sufficiently recovered to be able to entertain the topic, to the substitution of some good Conservative candidate in his place; but Mr. Gould treated this proposition with a scornful laugh, and told him that they would have had to do all they knew to pull Mr. Creswell through, and that to attempt to run anybody else at that late period would be madness. So a private meeting of the principal supporters of the party was held at the Lion, and Mr. Gould--who had run up to London in the interim, and had an interview with the chief wire-pullers--announced that in consequence of Mr. Creswell's unfortunate illness, it had been decided to withdraw him from the candidature, and, as there was no prospect of success for any one else who might be started in the same interest, to refrain from contesting the borough at this election. This announcement was received in dead silence, broken by Mr. Croke's frank and outspoken denunciation of the cowardice, the "trem'lousness," the "not to put too foin p'int upon it, the funk" which seemed to have seized upon some as "owt t' knaw better." The meeting was held in the evening, most of the company present had steaming glasses of grog before them, and Mr. Croke's outspoken oratory elicited a vast amount of applause and knocking on the tables with the stalwart feet of the tumblers. A young farmer of the neighbourhood, popular from his openhandedness and, his skill in rifle-shooting--he was champion