g better to do than to get some safe and docile person
to take on him the representation of the borough for some time to come.
Those who knew Keeton could recommend no one more fitting in every
desirable way than Mr. Augustus Sheppard.

The time was when Mr. Sheppard would only have had to present the
orders of the reigning duke to the constituency of Keeton and to take
his seat in the House of Commons accordingly as if by virtue of a
sovereign patent in ancient days. But times had changed even in sleepy
Keeton. The younger generation had almost forgotten their dukes, it was
so long since a chief of the house had been among them. Even the women
had grown comparatively indifferent to the influence of the name seeing
that it had so long been only a name for them. There had been for many
years no duchesses and their lady daughters to meet at flower-shows and
charitable bazaars, by the delight of whose face, and the sound of
whose feet, and the wind of whose tresses, as the poet has it, they
could be made to feel happy and exalted. There once were brighter days
when the coming and going of the ladies at the castle gave the women of
Keeton a perpetual subject of talk, of thought, of hope, and of
quarrel. Some of the readers of this story may perhaps have spent a
little time in small towns on the banks of foreign--say of
American--rivers which have a habit of freezing up as winter comes, and
becoming useless for navigation; in fact being converted from rivers
into great frozen roads, until spring unlocks the flowers and the
streams again. Such travellers must have noticed what an unfailing
topic of conversation such a river supplies to those who dwell on its
banks. How soon will it freeze this season? On what precise day was it
closed to navigation last year--the year before--the year before that?
In what year did it freeze soonest? Do you remember that particular
year when it froze so very soon, or did not freeze for such an
unprecedented length of time? That was the same year that--no, not that
year; it was the other year, don't you remember? Then follow
contradictions and disputes, and the elders always remember the river
having been regularly in the habit of performing some feat which now it
never cares to repeat. The time of the frost melting and the river
becoming really a river again is a matter just as fruitful of
discussion. The stranger is often tempted to wonder what the people of
that place would have to talk abou