“So I will go down to Somerset,” said Horne Fisher.

“Yes, it is on the way to Westminster,” said Lord Saltoun, with a smile.

And so it happened that Horne Fisher arrived some days later at the little station of a rather remote market town in the west, accompanied by a light suitcase and a lively brother.  It must not be supposed, however, that the brother’s cheerful tone consisted entirely of chaff.  He supported the new candidate with hope as well as hilarity; and at the back of his boisterous partnership there was an increasing sympathy and encouragement.  Harry Fisher had always had an affection for his more quiet and eccentric brother, and was now coming more and more to have a respect for him.  As the campaign proceeded the respect increased to ardent admiration.  For Harry was still young, and could feel the sort of enthusiasm for his captain in electioneering that a schoolboy can feel for his captain in cricket.

Nor was the admiration undeserved.  As the new three-cornered contest developed it became apparent to others besides his devoted kinsman that there was more in Horne Fisher than had ever met the eye.  It was clear that his outbreak by the family fireside had been but the culmination of a long course of brooding and studying on the question.  The talent he retained through life for studying his subject, and even somebody else’s subject, had long been concentrated on this idea of championing a new peasantry against a new plutocracy.  He spoke to a crowd with eloquence and replied to an individual with humor, two political arts that seemed to come to him naturally.  He certainly knew much more about rural problems than either Hughes, the Reform candidate, or Verner, the Constitutional candidate.  And he probed those problems with a human curiosity, and went below the surface in a way that neither of them dreamed of doing.  He soon became the voice of popular feelings that are never found in the popular press.  New angles of criticism, arguments that had never before been uttered by an educated voice, tests and comparisons that had been made only in dialect by men drinking in the little local public houses, crafts half forgotten that had come down by sign of hand and tongue from remote ages when their fathers were free—­all this created a curious and double excitement.  It startled the well informed by being a new and fantastic idea they had never encountered.  It startled the ignorant by being an old and familiar idea they never thought to have seen revived.  Men saw things in a new light, and knew not even whether it was the sunset or the dawn.