ng public
expression to this, a banquet on such a scale was organised at the
Barkly Hotel, as to inspire in the commercial mind of Jones regrets that
a paternal government did not furnish a perennial supply of highly
popular officials to Doppersdorp, providing at the same time for their
transfer at least every three months. And how the champagne corks which
popped during that historic entertainment constituted a great multitude
which no man could number; and how Sonnenberg was of deliberate purpose,
and of malice aforethought, set down to carve a roasted sucking-pig; and
now he not only cheerfully performed that function, but likewise partook
largely of the infantile porker, in direct defiance of his tormentors
and of the law of Moses; and how the thunders of applause which greeted
the toast of the guest of the evening, caused Jones to tremble lest his
property should be engulphed in a fate similar to that which overtook
the temple of Dagon; and how Roden Musgrave, responding for The Civil
Service, waxed so eloquent upon the virtues of his departing chief, as
to draw from the latter the stage-whispered remark, that "butter seemed
cheap just then";--are not all these things graven in the annals of
Doppersdorp, which is the Centre of the Earth? How, too, many of the
assembled worthies, those who ate peas with their knives, and those who
did not, finished up the evening by getting gloriously drunk, the
anxiety of whom to "chair" home the said guest of the evening being only
defeated by those whose regard for that official's valuable existence,
even though it should thenceforward be spent elsewhere, was of a
practical nature;--this, too, we regret to say, is likewise faithfully
recorded among the archives aforesaid. But the enthusiasm of
Doppersdorp, if highly demonstrative, not to say uproarious, was, for
once in a way, very real.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR.

"WHO KNEW NOT JOSEPH."

Mr Frederick Romsey Shaston, the new Resident Magistrate of
Doppersdorp, was in every respect a direct antithesis of the old one.

In aspect he was a square-built, middle-aged man, with grizzled hair,
and rather thin, short beard, prominent nose, and cold blue eyes; a man
of few words, and those few words, when spoken, conveying distinctly
that in the speaker's mind there was but one opinion worth the slightest
consideration in all the world--viz., that of Mr Frederick Romsey
Shaston.

He was a man to dislike on sight, one whose manner m