Now men will say anything in the passion of elections; but when it was reported that Mr.Nevill Tyson had in private pronounced Sir Peter to be a "miserable time-server," and in public (that is to say, in Drayton Town Hall) declared excitedly--"We will have no time-servers--men who will go through any gate you open for them--we Leicestershire people want a man who rides straight across country, and doesn't funk his fences!" And when Sir Peter remarked that "no doubt Mr.Tyson had taken some nasty ones in his time," everybody knew that there was something more behind all this than mere party feeling.

Sir Peter was right: that electioneering business was Tyson's third great mistake.

It proved, what nobody would have been very much aware of, that Nevill Tyson, Esquire, had next to no standing in the county.

As a public man he was worse off than he would have been as a harmless private individual.

He could never have been found out if he had only stayed quietly at home and devoted himself to the cultivation of orchids, in the manner of old Tyson, who had managed to hoodwink himself and his neighbors into the belief that he was a country gentleman.