One, in particular, I remember.  Nature had meant him to be a sour man, a hard man, a man with but little joy in the company of his fellows.  Fate had made him a candidate for the House of Commons.  So he was doing his best to belie his nature.

“Hullo, William!” he would call out as a man passed driving a horse and buggy, “got the little sorrel out for a spin, eh?”

Then he would turn to me and say in a low rasping voice—­

“There goes about the biggest skunk in this whole constituency.”

A few minutes later he would wave his hand over a little hedge in friendly salutation to a man working in a garden.

“Hullo, Jasper!  That’s a fine lot of corn you’ve got there.”

Jasper replied in a growl.  And when we were well past the house the candidate would say between his teeth—­

“That’s about the meanest whelp in the riding.”

Our conversation all down the street was of that pattern.

“Good morning, Edward!  Giving the potatoes a dose of Paris green, eh?”

And in an undertone—­

“I wish to Heaven he’d take a dose of it himself.”

And so on from house to house.

I counted up, from one end of the street to the other, that there were living in it seven skunks, fourteen low whelps, eight mean hounds and two dirty skinflints.  And all of these merely among the Conservative voters.  It made me wish to be a Liberal.  Especially as the Liberal voters, by the law of the perversity of human affairs, always seemed to be the finer lot.  As they were not voting for our candidate, they were able to meet him in a fair and friendly way, whereas William and Jasper and Edward and our “bunch” were always surly and hardly deigned to give more than a growl in answer to the candidate’s greeting, without even looking up at him.

But a Liberal voter would stop him in the street and shake hands and say in a frank, cordial way.

“Mr. Grouch, I’m sorry indeed that I can’t vote for you, and I’d like to be able to wish you success, but of course you know I’m on the other side and always have been and can’t change now.”

Whereupon the Candidate would say.  “That’s all right, John, I don’t expect you to.  I can respect a man’s convictions all right, I guess.”

So they would part excellent friends, the Candidate saying as we moved off: 

“That man, John Winter, is one of the straightest men in this whole county.”

Then he would add—­

“Now we’ll just go into this house for a minute.  There’s a dirty pup in here that’s one of our supporters.”

My opinion of our own supporters went lower every day, and my opinion of the Liberal voters higher, till it so happened that I went one day to an old friend of mine who was working on the Liberal side.  I asked him how he liked it.

“Oh, well enough!” he said, “as a sort of game.  But in this constituency you’ve got all the decent voters; our voters are the lowest bunch of skunks I ever struck.”