“I met Shortis the other night in the street,” went on Mr. Bughouse, “and he said, ’Come on up to my room in the hotel.’  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I can’t very well.’  ‘Nonsense,’ he said, ’You’re on the other side but what does that matter?’ Well, we went up to his room, and there he had whiskey, and gin, and lager,—­everything.  ‘Now,’ he says, ‘name your drink—­what is it?’ There he was, right in his room, breaking the law without caring a darn about it.  Well, you know the voters like that kind of thing.  It appeals to them.”

“Well,” said another of the Committee men,—­I think it was the one called Mr. Dope, “I wouldn’t mind that so much.  But the chief trouble about our man, to my mind, is that he can’t speak.”

“He can’t?” I exclaimed.

All the Committee shook their heads.

“Not for sour apples!” asserted Mr. Dope positively.  “Now, in this riding that won’t do.  Our people here are used to first class speaking, they expect it.  I suppose there has been better speaking in this Constituency than anywhere else in the whole dominion.  Not lately, perhaps; not in the last few elections.  But I can remember, and so can some of the boys here, the election when Sir John A. spoke here, when the old Mackenzie government went out.”

He looked around at the circle.  Several nodded.

“Remember it as well,” assented Mr. Mudd, “as if it were yesterday.”

“Well, sir,” continued Mr. Dope, “I’ll never forget Sir John A. speaking here in the Odd Fellows’ Hall, eh?”

The Committee men nodded and gurgled in corroboration.

“My! but he was plastered. We had him over at Pete Robinson’s hotel all afternoon, and I tell you he was plastered for fair.  We all were.  I remember I was so pickled myself I could hardly help Sir John up the steps of the platform.  So were you, Mudd, do you remember?”

“I certainly was!” said Mr. Mudd proudly.  Committee men who would scorn to drink lager beer in 1919, take a great pride, I have observed, in having been pickled in 1878.

“Yes, sir,” continued Mr. Dope, “you certainly were pickled.  I remember just as well as anything, when they opened the doors and let the crowd in:  all the boys had been bowling up and were pretty well soused.  You never saw such a crowd.  Old Dr. Greenway (boys, you remember the old Doc) was in the chair, and he was pretty well spifflocated.  Well, sir, Sir John A. got up in that hall and he made the finest, most moving speech I ever listened to.  Do you remember when he called old Trelawney an ash-barrel?  And when he made that appeal for a union of hearts and said that the sight of McGuire (the Liberal candidate) made him sick?  I tell you those were great days.  You don’t get speaking like that now; and you don’t get audiences like that now either.  Not the same calibre.”

All the Committee shook their heads.

“Well, anyway, boys,” said the Chairman, as he lighted a fresh cigar, “to-morrow will decide, one way or the other.  We’ve certainly worked hard enough,”—­here he passed the box of cigars round to the others—­“I haven’t been in bed before two any night since the work started.”