"I'll grind her!" remarked the honourable gentleman, in the bosom of his family, and before long he found his opportunity.

In the next parliamentary recess, he again spoke at Hollingford, this time at a festal meeting of the Conservative Club, where the gentility of town and district was well represented.

His subject was the British Aristocracy, its glories in the past, its honours in the present, and the services it would render in a future dark with revolutionary menace.

The only passage which had any particular meaning, or to which anyone listened, ran pretty much thus: "Ladies and gentleman--ha--hum--we pride ourselves on the fact that--ha--our Aristocracy is recruited from the choice representatives of the middle class--hum.

The successful in every--that is to say in all the respectable branches of activity--ha--see before them the possibility, I would say the glorious possibility, of taking a seat in that illustrious Upper Chamber, which is the balance of our free Constitution.