When that old farmer at the hunt breakfast had removed himself and his belongings to the other side of the table the Senator, though aware of the justice of his cause, had been keenly alive to the rebuke.  He had expressed himself very boldly at the rector’s house at Dillsborough, and had been certain that not a word of real argument had been possible in answer to him.  But yet he left the house with a feeling almost of shame, which had grown into real penitence before he reached Bragton.  He knew that he had already been condemned by Englishmen as ill-mannered, ill-conditioned and absurd.  He was as much alive as any man to the inward distress of heart which such a conviction brings with it to all sensitive minds.  And yet he had his purpose and would follow it out.  He was already hard at work on the lecture which he meant to deliver somewhere in London before he went back to his home duties, and had made it known to the world at large that he meant to say some sharp things of the country he was visiting.

Soon after his return to town he was present at the opening of Parliament, Mr. Mounser Green of the Foreign Office having seen that he was properly accommodated with a seat.  Then he went down to the election of a member of Parliament in the little borough of Quinborough.  It was unfortunate for Great Britain, which was on its trial, and unpleasant also for the poor Senator who had appointed himself judge, that such a seat should have fallen vacant at that moment.  Quinborough was a little town of 3,000 inhabitants clustering round the gates of a great Whig Marquis, which had been spared,—­who can say why?—­at the first Reform Bill, and having but one member had come out scatheless from the second.  Quinborough still returned its one member with something less than 500 constituents, and in spite of household suffrage and the ballot had always returned the member favoured by the Marquis.  This nobleman, driven no doubt by his conscience to make some return to the country for the favour shown to his family, had always sent to Parliament some useful and distinguished man who without such patronage might have been unable to serve his country.  On the present occasion a friend of the people,—­so called,—­an unlettered demagogue such as is in England in truth distasteful to all classes, had taken himself down to Quinborough as a candidate in opposition to the nobleman’s nominee.  He had been backed by all the sympathies of the American Senator who knew nothing of him or his unfitness, and nothing whatever of the patriotism of the Marquis.  But he did know what was the population and what the constituency of Liverpool, and also what were those of Quinborough.  He supposed that he knew what was the theory of representation in England, and he understood correctly that hitherto the member for Quinborough had been the nominee of that great lord.  These things were horrid to him.  There was to his thinking a fiction,—­more than fiction, a falseness,—­about all this