A VANISHING SECRETARY 



rendering me more tender-hearted towards chief 

 magistrates than previously. " A fellow feeling 

 makes us wondrous kind." 



If anyone had told me in my young days that 

 any agricultural showman least of all myself 

 robed and cock-hatted, would ever have been 

 escorted to his show yard by a Lord Mayor (of 

 Bristol), a bewigged Town Clerk, and the life 

 partner of his joys and sorrows, all disporting 

 themselves in a gorgeous equipage, guarded by 

 mounted myrmidons and preceded by a Tudor- 

 attired sword-bearer and divers mace-bearers, 

 I should have counselled his friends to lose no 

 time in settling in which institution for shattered 

 intellects he could be best bestowed. Yet so it 

 fell out. 



Every one, from the President of the Society 

 and the Town Clerk downwards, did their best 

 to keep the ball rolling, otherwise the dual-per- 

 sonality jest alive, and the atmosphere of the 

 show yard was dense with japes and jokelets. 



The president, in receiving and welcoming the 

 Mayor at the inaugural function in the show 

 yard, began by publicly apologizing for the 

 absence of the secretary, whom, he said, " had 

 vanished into thin air." This gave the Mayor, 

 in his reply, the opportunity of regretting the 

 secretary's absence, and of stating that he had 

 been given to understand that when the Society's 

 Council invited the Mayor to open the show the 

 secretary at once obtained leave to absent himself 

 during that ceremony. His Worship thought 

 it right, in order to remove any misapprehension, 

 to explain that this action on the part of the 



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