Chronicles of Dustypore

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ash critics who had the temerity to attempt it were put down with the contemptuous decisiveness appropriate to ill-judged advisers. There was a regular conventional way of crushing them: first it was contended that, being outsiders, they could not, in the nature of things, understand the matter; as if there was a sort of inner and spiritual sense, by which the affairs of the Salt Board must be apprehended. Then there were stereotyped phrases, which really meant nothing, but which were understood and accepted in the Sandy Tracts as implying that the Board considered the subject disposed of and did not want further discussion. Arguments which could not be otherwise met were smothered in an array of big names, or parried by pathetic references to the zeal of the Salt officials and the conscientious manner in which they worked in the sun. Whatever line was adopted, it was the invariable tradition that Government should express its concurrence, and so the whole thing ended comfortably to all parties concerned. All this was naturally regarded as being highly satisfactory. But the maintenance of this agreeable equilibrium depended on the persons concerned being tempered of the right metal, imbued with the right spirit, and what Strutt used to call 'loyal.' The intrusion of an alien spirit could not fail to produce deplorable disturbance, disquiet and the dissipation of all sorts

ation at the Board that the accounts were kept on an entirely wrong foo

air of quiet assurance, arising from his having given the

unt, pushing the papers across to Fotherin

us distrust of Fotheringham's explanations. Thereupon Strutt appeared, radiant and self-satisfied, and clear

the floating balance, but in Suspense Account A: here it

ring his blunder with an air of plac

oating balance; and pray where are the other items, and what is Suspense Acco

sant swagger disappear, and his answers get wilder and wilder as Blunt led him from figure to figure, pu

sent down for Vernon and the Head Accountant, and these two brought up a pile of ledgers, and traced the missing sums from one account into a

le Blunt was onl

cept that the system of accounts is deplorable. Any amount of fraud might be perpetrated under them. I can't understand them: Strutt d

, and this was one reason wh

colleagues was his way of coughing-a loud,

throw an expression that sounded horribly like 'damn it' into his mode of clearing his throat; and that when Fo