uite surprising
considering that he cannot often have practised the tune. Behind the
bands closely surrounded by torch bearers came a confused crowd of men
dragging and pushing a wagonette, from which the horses had been taken.
In the wagonette were Lalage and Hilda. Lalage was standing up in the
driver's seat, a most perilous position. She had in one hand a large
roll of white ribbon, the now well-known symbol of the Association
for the Suppression of Public Lying, and in her other hand a pair of
scissors. She snipped off bits of the ribbon and allowed them to go
fluttering away from her in the wind. The crowd scrambled eagerly for
them, and it was plain that the association was enrolling members in
hundreds. Hilda seemed less happy. She was crouching in the body of the
wagonette and looked frightened. Perhaps she was thinking of her mother.
I crept back to bed when the procession had passed and felt deeply
thankful that I was laid up with influenza. Lalage's meeting was,
without doubt, an unqualified success.

Newspapers are, as a rule, busy enough about what happens even in quite
obscure constituencies during by-elections. If ours had been one of
those occasional contests the subject of public lying, Lalage's portrait
and the story of the two bands men would have been quite familiar to
all readers. During a general election very few details of particular
campaigns can be printed. Editors are kept busy enough chronicling the
results and keeping up to date the various clocks, ladders, kites and
other devices with which they inform their readers of the state
of parties. I was therefore quite hopeful that our performances in
Ballygore would escape notice. They did not. Some miserably efficient
and enterprising reporter strayed into the town on the very evening of
Lalage's meeting and wrote an account of her torchlight procession. The
whole thing appeared next morning in the paper which he represented.
Other papers copied his paragraphs, and very soon hundreds of them in
all parts of the three kingdoms were making merry over the plight of the
candidates who lay in bed groaning while a piratical young woman took
away their characters. I did not in the least mind being laughed at.
I have always laughed at myself and am quite pleased that other people
should share my amusement. But I greatly feared that complications of
various kinds would follow the publicity which was given to our affairs.
Vittie almost certainly, O'Donogh