d himself at Mount
Laurels in the course of the week, she had nothing to say, except that
he was very like the photograph, very unlike Nevil Beauchamp. 'Yes,
there I'm of your opinion,' her father observed. The gentleman was Mr.
Blackburn Tuckham, and it was amusing to find an exuberant Tory in one
who was the reverse of the cavalier type. Nevil and he seemed to have
been sorted to the wrong sides. Mr. Tuckham had a round head, square
flat forehead, and ruddy face; he stood as if his feet claimed the earth
under them for his own, with a certain shortness of leg that detracted
from the majesty of his resemblance to our Eighth Harry, but increased
his air of solidity; and he was authoritative in speaking. 'Let me set
you right, sir,' he said sometimes to Colonel Halkett, and that was
his modesty. 'You are altogether wrong,' Miss Halkett heard herself
informed, which was his courtesy. He examined some of her water-colour
drawings before sitting down to dinner, approved of them, but thought
it necessary to lay a broad finger on them to show their defects. On the
question of politics, 'I venture to state,' he remarked, in anything but
the tone of a venture, 'that no educated man of ordinary sense who has
visited our colonies will come back a Liberal.' As for a man of sense
and education being a Radical, he scouted the notion with a pooh
sufficient to awaken a vessel in the doldrums. He said carelessly of
Commander Beauchamp, that he might think himself one. Either the Radical
candidate for Bevisham stood self-deceived, or--the other supposition.
Mr. Tuckham would venture to state that no English gentleman, exempt
from an examination by order of the Commissioners of Lunacy, could be
sincerely a Radical. 'Not a bit of it; nonsense,' he replied to Miss
Halkett's hint at the existence of Radical views; 'that is, those views
are out of politics; they are matters for the police. Dutch dykes are
built to shut away the sea from cultivated land, and of course it's a
part of the business of the Dutch Government to keep up the dykes,--and
of ours to guard against the mob; but that is only a political
consideration after the mob has been allowed to undermine our defences.'

'They speak,' said Miss Halkett, 'of educating the people to fit them--'

'They speak of commanding the winds and tides,' he cut her short, with
no clear analogy; 'wait till we have a storm. It's a delusion amounting
to dementedness to suppose, that with the people i