’I have despatched you the proclamation, folded neatly.  The electors of Bevisham are summoned, like a town at the sword’s point, to yield him their votes.  Proclamation is the word.  I am your born representative!  I have completed my political education on salt water, and I tackle you on the Land question.  I am the heir of your votes, gentlemen!—­I forgot, and I apologize; he calls them fellow-men.  Fraternal, and not so risky.  Here at Lespel’s we read the thing with shouts.  It hangs in the smoking-room.  We throw open the curacoa to the intelligence and industry of the assembled guests; we carry the right of the multitude to our host’s cigars by a majority.  C’est un farceur que notre bon petit cousin.  Lespel says it is sailorlike to do something of this sort after a cruise.  Nevil’s Radicalism would have been clever anywhere out of Bevisham.  Of all boroughs!  Grancey Lespel knows it.  He and his family were Bevisham’s Whig M.P.’s before the day of Manchester.  In Bevisham an election is an arrangement made by Providence to square the accounts of the voters, and settle arrears.  They reckon up the health of their two members and the chances of an appeal to the country when they fix the rents and leases.  You have them pointed out to you in the street, with their figures attached to them like titles.  Mr. Tomkins, the twenty-pound man; an elector of uncommon purity.  I saw the ruffian yesterday.  He has an extra breadth to his hat.  He has never been known to listen to a member under L20, and is respected enormously—­like the lady of the Mythology, who was an intolerable Tartar of virtue, because her price was nothing less than a god, and money down.  Nevil will have to come down on Bevisham in the Jupiter style.  Bevisham is downright the dearest of boroughs—­“vaulting-boards,” as Stukely Culbrett calls them—­in the kingdom.  I assume we still say “kingdom.”

’He dashed into the Radical trap exactly two hours after landing.  I believe he was on his way to the Halketts at Mount Laurels.  A notorious old rascal revolutionist retired from his licenced business of slaughterer—­one of your gratis doctors—­met him on the high-road, and told him he was the man.  Up went Nevil’s enthusiasm like a bottle rid of the cork.  You will see a great deal about faith in the proclamation; “faith in the future,” and “my faith in you.”  When you become a Radical you have faith in any quantity, just as an alderman gets turtle soup.  It is your badge, like a livery-servant’s cockade or a corporal’s sleeve stripes—­your badge and your bellyful.  Calculations were gone through at the Liberal newspaper-office, old Nevil adding up hard, and he was informed that he was elected by something like a topping eight or nine hundred and some fractions.  I am sure that a fellow who can let himself be gulled by a pile of figures trumped up in a Radical newspaper-office must have great faith in the fractions.  Out came Nevil’s proclamation.