Just then a man passed in a buggy, and looked sourly at my friend the Liberal worker.

“Hullo, John!” he called, with a manufactured hilarity, “got the little mare out for a turn, eh?”

John grunted.

“There’s one of them,” said my friend, “the lowest pup in this county, John Winter.”

“Come along,” said the Candidate to me one morning, “I want you to meet my committee.”

“You’ll find them,” he said confidingly, as we started down the street towards the committee rooms, “an awful bunch of mutts.”

“Too bad,” I said, “what’s wrong with them?”

“Oh, I don’t know—­they’re just a pack of simps.  They don’t seem to have any punch in them.  The one you’ll meet first is the chairman—­he’s about the worst dub of the lot; I never saw a man with so little force in my life.  He’s got no magnetism, that’s what’s wrong with him—­no magnetism.”

A few minutes later the Candidate was introducing me to a roomful of heavy looking Committee men.  Committee men in politics, I notice, have always a heavy bovine look.  They are generally in a sort of daze, or doped from smoking free cigars.

“Now I want to introduce you first,” said the Candidate, “to our chairman, Mr. Frog.  Mr. Frog is our old battle horse in this constituency.  And this is our campaign secretary Mr. Bughouse, and Mr. Dope, and Mr. Mudd, et cetera.”

Those may not have been their names.

It is merely what the names sounded like when one was looking into their faces.

The Candidate introduced them all as battle horses, battle axes, battle leaders, standard bearers, flag-holders, and so forth.  If he had introduced them as hat-racks or cigar holders, it would have been nearer the mark.

Presently the Candidate went out and I was left with the battle-axes.

“What do you think of our chances?” I asked.

The battle-axes shook their heads with dubious looks.

“Pretty raw deal,” said the Chairman, “the Convention wishing him on us.”  He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the departed Candidate.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

Mr. Frog shook his head again.

“No punch,” he said.

“None at all,” agreed all the battle horses.

“I’ll tell you,” said the Campaign secretary, Mr. Bughouse, a voluble man, with wandering eyes—­“the trouble is he has no magnetism, no personal magnetism.”

“I see,” I said.

“Now, you take this man, Shortis, that the Liberals have got hold of,” continued Mr. Bughouse, “he’s full of magnetism.  He appeals.”

All the other Committee men nodded.

“That’s so,” they murmured, “magnetism, Our man hasn’t a darned ounce of it.”