The other candidates, Bung alone excepted, resigned in despair.

The day of election was fixed; and the canvass proceeded with briskness and perseverance on both sides.
The members of the vestry could not be supposed to escape the contagious excitement inseparable from the occasion.

The majority of the lady inhabitants of the parish declared at once for Spruggins; and the _quondam_ overseer took the same side, on the ground that men with large families always had been elected to the office, and that although he must admit, that, in other respects, Spruggins was the least qualified candidate of the two, still it was an old practice, and he saw no reason why an old practice should be departed from.

This was enough for the captain.

He immediately sided with Bung, canvassed for him personally in all directions, wrote squibs on Spruggins, and got his butcher to skewer them up on conspicuous joints in his shop-front; frightened his neighbour, the old lady, into a palpitation of the heart, by his awful denunciations of Spruggins's party; and bounced in and out, and up and down, and backwards and forwards, until all the sober inhabitants of the parish thought it inevitable that he must die of a brain fever, long before the election began.
The day of election arrived.