The cheers rose again in surging waves.

Everyone remarked that the Mayor, usually so imperturbable, was quite overcome—­seemed as if he didn’t know where to look.

Afterwards, as the occupants of the platform descended, Mr. Gordon glanced into the eyes of Mrs. Curtenty, and found there his exceeding reward.  The mediocrity had blossomed out that evening into something new and strange.  Liar, deliberate liar and self-accused gambler as he was, he felt that he had lived during that speech; he felt that it was the supreme moment of his life.

‘What a perfectly wonderful man your husband is!’ said Mrs. Duncalf to Mrs. Curtenty.

Clara turned to her husband with a sublime gesture of satisfaction.  In the brougham, going home, she bewitched him with wifely endearments.  She could afford to do so.  The stigma of the geese episode was erased.

But the barmaid of the Tiger, as she let down her bright hair that night in the attic of the Tiger, said to herself, ‘Well, of all the——­’ Just that.

* * * * *

THE ELIXIR OF YOUTH

It was Monday afternoon of Bursley Wakes—­not our modern rectified festival, but the wild and naive orgy of seventy years ago, the days of bear-baiting and of bull-baiting, from which latter phrase, they say, the town derives its name.  In those times there was a town-bull, a sort of civic beast; and a certain notorious character kept a bear in his pantry.  The ‘beating’ (baiting) occurred usually on Sunday mornings at six o’clock, with formidable hungry dogs; and little boys used to look forward eagerly to the day when they would be old enough to be permitted to attend.  On Sunday afternoons colliers and potters, gathered round the jawbone of a whale which then stood as a natural curiosity on the waste space near the corn-mill, would discuss the fray, and make bets for next Sunday, while the exhausted dogs licked their wounds, or died.  During the Wakes week bull and bear were baited at frequent intervals, according to popular demand, for thousands of sportsmen from neighbouring villages seized the opportunity of the fair to witness the fine beatings for which Bursley was famous throughout the country of the Five Towns.  In that week the Wakes took possession of the town, which yielded itself with savage abandonment to all the frenzies of license.  The public-houses remained continuously open night and day, and the barmen and barmaids never went to bed; every inn engaged special ‘talent’ in order to attract custom, and for a hundred hours the whole thronged town drank, drank, until the supply of coin of George IV., converging gradually into the coffers of a few persons, ceased to circulate.  Towards the end of the Wakes, by way of a last ecstasy, the cockfighters would carry their birds, which had already fought and been called off, perhaps, half a dozen times, to the town-field (where the discreet 40 per cent. brewery now stands), and there match them to a finish.  It was a spacious age.