into fresh life, and country houses became merely election committee rooms. Lord Teviot's name had been one of the first on Mr. G.'s list of his Cabinet, and a messenger had been despatched to recall him from Portugal. This appointment of his son-in-law gave additional energy to Lord Eskdale's ministerial politics. His son had been member for the neighbouring town of Boroughford in the last parliament; and if by any degree of exertion or expense—a gentlemanlike term for bribery—he could return his nephew for the second seat, it would be in many respects a clever stroke of policy. He should bring another vote in aid of the great G. cause; he should have the honour and glory of possessing, to all appearance, a borough of his own; and he should inflict a mortal blow on the Duke of Broughton, the lord-lieutenant of the county, with whose family he had invariably been on terms of polite rivalry and civil hatred, and who at the last election had contrived to insinuate one of his own nephews, Captain Luttridge, into the borough.
The only great difficulty Lord Eskdale anticipated was with Colonel Beaufort himself, whose habits of indolence would be much opposed to the work of canvassing. But in this he was mistaken. There is no stage of inertness and don't-carishness from which an Englishman may not be roused by the stimulus of politics; and a contested election is perhaps one of the finest remedies that can be applied to a confirmed languor, either of mind or body. Ernest caught eagerly at his uncle's proposal, travelled all night from town, and started on his canvass with his cousin an hour after his arrival, passed eleven hours on visits to the electors, and ended the day by making a speech at the Eskdale Arms to two hundred and fifty dirty-looking men, all smoking bad tobacco, and drinking worse beer; and most of whom were sufficiently drunk to insist on shaking hands with him four or five times in the course of the even-
