“Neither have I,” said another of the workers.  “I was just saying to the wife when I got up this morning that I begin to feel as if I never wanted to see the sight of a card again.”

“Well, I don’t regret the work,” said the Secretary, “so long as we carry the riding.  You see,” he added in explanation to me, “we’re up against a pretty hard proposition here.  This riding really is Liberal:  they’ve got the majority of voters though we have once or twice swung it Conservative.  But whether we can carry it with a man like Grouch is hard to say.  One thing is certain, boys, if he does carry it, he doesn’t owe it to himself.”

All the battle horses agreed on this.  A little after that we dispersed.

And twenty-four hours later the vote was taken and to my intense surprise the riding was carried by Grouch the Conservative candidate.

I say, to my surprise.  But apparently not to anybody else.

For it appeared this (was in conversations after the election) that Grouch was a man of extraordinary magnetism.  He had, so they said, “punch.”  Shortis, the Liberal, it seemed, lacked punch absolutely.  Even his own supporters admitted that he had no personality whatever.  Some wondered how he had the nerve to run.

But my own theory of how the election was carried is quite different.

I feel certain that all the Conservative voters despised their candidate so much that they voted Liberal.  And all the Liberals voted Conservative.

That carried the riding.

Meantime Grouch left the constituency by the first train next day for Ottawa.  Except for paying taxes on his house, he will not be back in the town till they dissolve parliament again.

5.—­The Lost Illusions of Mr. Sims

In the club to which I belong, in a quiet corner where the sunlight falls in sideways, there may be seen sitting of an afternoon my good friend of thirty years’ standing, Mr. Edward Sims.  Being somewhat afflicted with gout, he generally sits with one foot up on a chair.  On a brass table beside him are such things as Mr. Sims needs.  But they are few.  Wealthy as he is, the needs of Mr. Sims reach scarcely further than Martini cocktails and Egyptian cigarettes.  Such poor comforts as these, brought by a deferential waiter, with, let us say, a folded newspaper at five o’clock, suffice for all his wants.  Here sits Mr. Sims till the shadows fall in the street outside, when a limousine motor trundles up to the club and rolls him home.

And here of an afternoon Mr. Sims talks to me of his college days when he was young.  The last thirty years of his life have moved in so gentle a current upon so smooth a surface that they have been without adventure.  It is the stormy period of his youth that preoccupies my friend as he sits looking from the window of the club at the waving leaves in the summer time and the driving snow in the winter.