the Liberal candidate. The extraordinary thing was that he got in.
I sometimes lie awake at night and meditate upon that mystery;
but it must not detain us now. The rather singular incident
which happened to me then, and which some recent events have
recalled to me, happened while the canvassing was still going on.
It was a burning blue day, and the warm sunshine, settling everywhere
on the high hedges and the low hills, brought out into a kind
of heavy bloom that HUMANE quality of the landscape which,
as far as I know, only exists in England; that sense as if
the bushes and the roads were human, and had kindness like men;
as if the tree were a good giant with one wooden leg;
as if the very line of palings were a row of good-tempered gnomes.
On one side of the white, sprawling road a low hill or down
showed but a little higher than the hedge, on the other the land
tumbled down into a valley that opened towards the Mendip hills.
The road was very erratic, for every true English road exists
in order to lead one a dance; and what could be more beautiful
and beneficent than a dance? At an abrupt turn of it I came upon
a low white building, with dark doors and dark shuttered windows,
evidently not inhabited and scarcely in the ordinary sense inhabitable--
a thing more like a toolhouse than a house of any other kind.
Made idle by the heat, I paused, and, taking a piece of red chalk
out of my pocket, began drawing aimlessly on the back door--
drawing goblins and Mr. Chamberlain, and finally the ideal
Nationalist with the Kruger beard. The materials did not permit
of any delicate rendering of his noble and national expansion
of countenance (stoical and yet hopeful, full of tears for man,
and yet of an element of humour); but the hat was finely handled.
Just as I was adding the finishing touches to the Kruger fantasy,
I was frozen to the spot with terror. The black door,