most captivating form.  At all events, he came to excellent understanding, whether of agreement or opposition, with the newspapermen he met—­Cruickshank knew a good many of them and these occasions were more fruitful than the official ones—­and there is no doubt that the guarded approval of certain leading columns had fewer ifs and buts and other qualifications in consequence, while the disapproval of others was marked by a kind of unwilling sympathy and a freely accorded respect.  Lorne found London editors surprisingly unbiased, London newspapers surprisingly untrammelled.  They seemed to him to suffer from no dictated views, no interests in the background or special local circumstances.  They had open minds, most of them, and when a cloud appeared it was seldom more than a prejudice.  It was only his impression, and perhaps it would not stand cynical inquiry; but he had a grateful conviction that the English Press occupied in the main a lofty and impartial ground of opinion, from which it desired only a view of the facts in their true proportion.  On his return he confided it to Horace Williams, who scoffed and ran the national politics of the Express in the local interests of Fox County as hard as ever; but it had fallen in with Lorne’s beautiful beliefs about England, and he clung to it for years.

The Williamses had come over the second evening following Lorne’s arrival, after tea.  Rawlins had gone to the station, just to see that the Express would make no mistake in announcing that Mr L. Murchison had “Returned to the Paternal Roof,” and the Express had announced it, with due congratulation.  Family feeling demanded that for the first twenty-four hours he should be left to his immediate circle, but people had been dropping in all the next day at the office, and now came the Williamses “trapesing,” as Mrs Murchison said, across the grass, though she was too content to make it more than a private grievance, to where they all sat on the verandah.

“What I don’t understand,” Horace Williams said to Mr Murchison, “was why you didn’t give him a blow on the whistle.  You and Milburn and a few others might have got up quite a toot.  You don’t get the secretary to a deputation for tying up the Empire home every day.”

“You did that for him in the Express,” said John Murchison, smiling as he pressed down, with an accustomed thumb, the tobacco into his pipe.

“Oh, we said nothing at all!  Wait till he’s returned for South Fox,” Williams responded jocularly.

“Why not the Imperial Council—­of the future—­at Westminster while you’re about it?” remarked Lorne, flipping a pebble back upon the gravel path.

“That will keep, my son.  But one of these days, you mark my words, Mr L. Murchison will travel to Elgin Station with flags on his engine and he’ll be very much surprised to find the band there, and a large number of his fellow-citizens, all able-bodied shouting men, and every factory whistle in Elgin let off at once, to say nothing of kids with tin ones.  And if the Murchison Stove and Furnace Works siren stands out of that occasion I’ll break in and pull it myself.”