Sweet and Twenty by Joan Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

with a soft smile. “Look what Mr. Alistair gave me,”she said, and offered her cousin a pamphlet. It was a Tory bulletin, puffing their candidate and mentioning the party’s platform. “He gave me a whole pile of them for my friends, and I have been leaving one in each shop we were in.”
    “Oh Sara, he’s a Tory!”
    “Papa, was a Tory. That’s why he asked me if I would like to do it.”
    “But we are working for Mr. Fellows!”
    “That’s nice. I am working for Mr. Alistair,”Sara said, and gazed meaningfully at the pamphlet with all the terribly hard words in it that she couldn’t make heads or tails of.
    She handed Lillian her next-to-last one and her cousin accepted it with some eagerness to see what she could learn of Mr. Alistair. She chucked it quickly into her purse to be read at home, for if Aunt Martha ever discovered what Sara had been up to, she’d skin her alive.
     

Chapter 5
     
    Whether through courtesy or for a lack of friendly homes in which to parade his candidate, Mr. Hudson stopped with Fellows at New Moon again the next morning on his way into the village. He thanked the ladies for distributing the charity goods and again for addressing the envelopes. He appeared a little depressed, but Fellows was in high gig, bragging to Sara about the fine showing he had made the night before at the Veterans’Hall when he met the grain-growers.
    “We had a marvelous turnout,”Fellows said. “Every grower for ten miles around was there to hear me speak. But I didn’t toady up to them as Alistair did. I stood my ground like a good Whig and laid into them for their greed, wanting to keep all the money for themselves. Money is the root of all evil and I begin to think grain is the next worst root.”
    “Do you not grow grain yourself?”Martha asked.
    “Certainly I do, but I don’t insist on ten shillings a bushel for it. Mind you, it is the going rate this year as a result of the Corn Laws. It is the Corn Laws that have given us such a good price, and it wouldn’t do to undersell my neighbors, but I hope I am not greedy. I have seen the light and am no longer a Tory. And when I am elected I mean to repeal the Corn Laws. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
    “What do you mean?”Martha asked.
    “Why—why—repealing the Corn Laws would prevent those repressive Tories from selling at ten shillings a bushel!”
    “I trust that was not the tenor of his speech to the grain-growers!” Lillian said to Mr. Hudson in a low voice. He had the air of a man who wants to put his head in his hands and weep.
    “You were right to warn me yesterday,”he said.
    “Did he make a very bad showing?”
    “He made wretched work of it. Just what you are hearing now, and worse. It had to be to the farmers he delivered what he was dipping into at Allingham’s yesterday. We’ll have to keep party literature from him.”
    “But you mean to run a good clean campaign, Mr.
Hudson. He could hardly claim to be in favor of the
Corn Laws.”
    “He could have explained why we are against them. The poor must be fed, and if their wages don’t enable them to buy food with the high cost of it due to this law, then the money must come from the parish dole, and where does that money come from but the wealthy of the parish? They give with one hand and take with the other. Better to sell their grain at a fair market price than to hike it up with duties on imported grain and put food beyond the reach of the working man. Every man is entitled to earn a fair wage. No one wants to be a beggar, and it must go against the pluck for a man who works sixteen hours a day to have to stand in line and beg for his bread.”
    “Mr. Fellows said nothing of that?”she asked, well-impressed with his words and principles, and particularly with his impassioned manner of delivering them.
    “He knows nothing of it, and he’s a grain-grower himself. But I don’t mean to disparage him; his intentions are certainly good. He is an