“I was close to him, and helped him up.  The horse jumped into a river with him, and crushed him up against the bank.”

“How lucky that you should be there!  Had you jumped the river?”

“Yes;—­almost unintentionally, for my horse was rushing so that I could not hold him.  Chiltern was riding a brute that no one should have ridden.  No one will again.”

“Did he destroy himself?”

“He had to be killed afterwards.  He broke his shoulder.”

“How very lucky that you should have been near him,—­and, again, how lucky that you should not have been hurt yourself!”

“It was not likely that we should both come to grief at the same fence.”

“But it might have been you.  And you think there is no danger?”

“None whatever,—­if I may believe the doctor.  His hunting is done for this year, and he will be very desolate.  I shall go down again to him in a few days, and try to bring him up to town.”

“Do;—­do.  If he is laid up in his father’s house, his father must see him.”  Phineas had not looked at the matter in that light; but he thought that Miss Effingham might probably be right.

Early on the next morning he saw Mr. Bunce, and used all his eloquence to keep that respectable member of society at home;—­but in vain.  “What good do you expect to do, Mr. Bunce?” he said, with perhaps some little tone of authority in his voice.

“To carry my point,” said Bunce.

“And what is your point?”

“My present point is the ballot, as a part of the Government measure.”

“And you expect to carry that by going out into the streets with all the roughs of London, and putting yourself in direct opposition to the authority of the magistrates?  Do you really believe that the ballot will become the law of the land any sooner because you incur this danger and inconvenience?”

“Look here, Mr. Finn; I don’t believe the sea will become any fuller because the Piddle runs into it out of the Dorsetshire fields; but I do believe that the waters from all the countries is what makes the ocean.  I shall help; and it’s my duty to help.”

“It’s your duty as a respectable citizen, with a wife and family, to stay at home.”

“If everybody with a wife and family was to say so, there’d be none there but roughs, and then where should we be?  What would the Government people say to us then?  If every man with a wife and family was to show hisself in the streets to-night, we should have the ballot before Parliament breaks up, and if none of ’em don’t do it, we shall never have the ballot.  Ain’t that so?” Phineas, who intended to be honest, was not prepared to dispute the assertion on the spur of the moment.  “If that’s so,” said Bunce, triumphantly, “a man’s duty’s clear enough.  He ought to go, though he’d two wives and families.”  And he went.