"He was hissed down at Shoalford yesterday," said one of the speakers.

Hissed! Had it come to that? There was something dramatically biblical
in the idea of Robert Bludward's neighbours and acquaintances hissing him
for very scorn. Lord Hereward Stranglath had been hissed, now Alethia
came to think of it, in the eighth chapter of _Matterby Towers_, while in
the act of opening a Wesleyan bazaar, because he was suspected (unjustly
as it turned out afterwards) of having beaten the German governess to
death. And in _Tainted Guineas_ Roper Squenderby had been deservedly
hissed, on the steps of the Jockey Club, for having handed a rival owner
a forged telegram, containing false news of his mother's death, just
before the start for an important race, thereby ensuring the withdrawal
of his rival's horse. In placid Saxon-blooded England people did not
demonstrate their feelings lightly and without some strong compelling
cause. What manner of evildoer was Robert Bludward?

The train stopped at another small station, and the two men got out. One
of them left behind him a copy of the _Argus_, the local paper to which
he had made reference. Alethia pounced on it, in the expectation of
finding a cultured literary endorsement of the censure which these rough
farming men had expressed in their homely, honest way. She had not far
to look; "Mr. Robert Bludward, Swanker," was the title of one of the
principal articles in the paper. She did not exactly know what a swanker
was, probably it referred to some unspeakable form of cruelty, but she
read enough in the first few sentences of the article to discover that
her cousin Robert, the man at whose house she was about to stay, was an
unscrupulous, unprincipled character, of a low order of intelligence, yet
cunning withal, and that he and his associates were responsible for most
of the misery, disease, poverty, and ignorance with which the country was
afflicted; never, except in one or two of the denunciatory Psalms, which