badge-holder in the local volunteers--rose and suggested that any such abject surrender as that proposed was ill-advised and inexpedient, and sat down, after finishing a long rambling speech, the purport of which was that some one should be put forward to fill the gap created by Mr. Creswell's lamented but unavoidable illness. That the gap should be filled, seemed to be a popular idea; but each of the ten or twelve speakers who subsequently addressed the meeting had different people for the post: and it was not until Mr. Teesdale pointed out the utter futility of attempting to begin the fight anew under a fresh banner, confessing that they would have had very great difficulty in bringing matters to a successful issue even with all the prestige of Mr. Creswell's name and position, that it seemed to dawn upon the meeting that their chance was hopeless. This had been told them at the outset by Mr. Gould; but he was from London, and, consequently, in the ideas of the farmers present, steeped in duplicity of every kind, and labouring under an impossibility of truth-speaking. Mr. Teesdale had infinitely more weight with his audience. They knew him as a man whose word was to be relied on, and the impossibility of doing anything beyond swallowing the bitter pill was acknowledged among them from that moment. True, that the pill was so bitter as to require the consumption of an extraordinary amount of brandy-and-water to get it down, a fact which helped to console old Tilley, the landlord, for the shock to his political principles. It is to be noted, also, that after the withdrawal of Messrs. Gould and Teesdale, the meeting gave itself up to harmony of a lugubrious character, and dismal ditties, mixed with fierce denunciations of democrats and reformers, were borne away on the still night air. So, within a day or two, the walls of Brocksopp were covered with placards signed in Mr. Creswell's name, setting forth the sad cause which prevented him from further exertion in the interests of freedom and purity of election, lamenting the impossibility of being able conscientiously to recommend a proper candidate to the constituency at so short a notice, but bidding the electors not to despair so long as there remained to them a House of Lords and an omniscient aristocracy. This document, which was the production of Mr. Teesdale (Mr. Gould had been called away to superintend certain other strongholds where the fortifications showed signs of crumbling), was supplemented by the copy of a medical certificate from Dr. Osborne, which stated that Mr. Creswell's condition was such as to imperatively demand the utmost quietude, and that any such excitement as that to be caused by entering on an election contest would probably cost him his life.