Again did the stentor-note of Daniel ring forth, and it was amid thunderous cheering that Richard left his chair and moved to the front of the platform.  His Sunday suit of black was still that with which his friends were familiar, but his manner, though the audience probably did not perceive the detail, was unmistakably hanged.  He had been wont to begin his address with short, stinging periods, with sneers and such bitterness of irony as came within his compass.  To-night he struck quite another key, mellow, confident, hinting at personal satisfaction; a smile was on his lips, and not a smile of scorn.  He rested one hand against his side, holding in the other a scrap of paper with jotted items of reasoning.  His head was thrown a little back; he viewed the benches from beneath his eyelids.  True, the pose maintained itself but for a moment.  I mention it because it was something new in Richard.

He spoke of the land; he attacked the old monopoly, and visioned a time when a claim to individual ownerships of the earth’s surface would be as ludicrous as were now the assertion of title to a fee-simple somewhere in the moon.  He mustered statistics; he adduced historic and contemporary example of the just and the unjust in land-holding; he gripped the throat of a certain English duke, and held him up for flagellation; he drifted into oceans of economic theory; he sat down by the waters of Babylon; he climbed Pisgah.  Had he but spoken of backslidings in the wilderness!  But for that fatal omission, the lecture was, of its kind, good.  By degrees Richard forgot his pose and the carefully struck note of mellowness; he began to believe what he was saying, and to say it with the right vigour of popular oratory.  Forget his struggles with the h-fiend; forget his syntactical lapses; you saw that after all the man had within him a clear flame of conscience; that he had felt before speaking that speech was one of the uses for which Nature had expressly framed him.  His invective seldom degenerated into vulgar abuse; one discerned in him at least the elements of what we call good taste; of simple manliness he disclosed not a little; he had some command of pathos.  In conclusion, he finished without reference to his personal concerns.

The chairman invited questions, preliminary to debate.

He rose half-way down the room,—­the man who invariably rises on these occasions.  He was oldish, with bent shoulders, and wore spectacles—­probably a clerk of forty years’ standing.  In his hand was a small note-book, which he consulted.  He began with measured utterance, emphatic, loud.

’I wish to propose to the lecturer seven questions.  I will read them in order; I have taken some pains to word them clearly.’

Richard has his scrap of paper on his knee.  He jots a word or two after each deliberate interrogation, smiling.

Other questioners succeeded.  Richard replies to them.  He fails to satisfy the man of seven queries, who, after repeating this and the other of the seven, professes himself still unsatisfied, shakes his head indulgently, walks from the room.