One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
the herd of heads agape and another cheer rang round. He
smiled with her, to be with her, at a hit here and there; he
would not pretend an approval of this manner of winning
electors to consider the country’s interests and their own.
One fellow in the crowded pit, affecting a familiarity with
Simeon, that permitted the taking of liberties with the
orator’s Christian name, mildly amused him. He had no
objection to hear ‘Simmy’ shouted, as Louise de Seilles
observed. She was of his mind, in regard to the rough machinery
of Freedom.
Skepsey entered the box.
‘We shall soon be serious, Miss Nesta,’ he said, after a look
at Matilda Pridden.
There was a prolonged roaring—on the cheerful side.
‘And another word about security that your candidate will
keep his promises,’ continued Simeon: ‘You have his word,
my friends!’ And he told the story of the old Governor of
Goa, who wanted money and summoned the usurers, and
they wanted security; whereupon he laid his Hidalgo hand
on a cataract of Kronos-beard across his breast, and pulled
forth three white hairs, and presented them: ‘And as
honourably to the usurious Jews as to the noble gentleman
himself, that security was accepted!’
Emerging from hearty clamours, the illustrative orator fell
upon the question of political specifics:—Mr. Victor Radnor
trusted to English good sense too profoundly to be offering
them positive cures, as they would hear the enemy say he
did. Yet a bit of a cure may be offered, if we ‘re not for pushing
it too far, in pursuit of the science of specifics, in the
style of the foreign physician, probably Spanish, who had no
practice, and wished for leisure to let him prosecute his anatomical
and other investigations to discover his grand medical
nostrum. So to get him fees meanwhile he advertised a
cure for dyspepsia—the resource of starving doctors. And
sure enough his patient came, showing the grand fat fellow
we may be when we carry more of the deciduously mortal
than of the scraggy vital upon our persons. Any one at a
glance would have prescribed water-cresses to him: watercresses
exclusively to eat for a fortnight. And that the good
physician did. Away went his patient, returning at the end
of the fortnight, lean, and with the appetite of a Toledo blade
for succulent slices. He vowed he was the man. Our esti-
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