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very funny if you were in the habit of drinking with the witch-doctor or the cardinal or the king in the local pub. In fact, what makes Fancy Dress funny is its incongruity; and it was certain incongruous aspects of the Town Council’s parade that made Double Alley roar with laughter. My uncle, who happened to be a good Mayor, matched his robes very well, and gave them dignity, and got dignity from them; nobody laughed at him when he wore them. But if Councillor X sold you bad fish and ran after the wenches when he was long past the age for such frivolity—if Councillor Y was your slum landlord and so mean that he wouldn’t repair your roof—you couldn’t be blamed for having a good laugh when you saw him shuffling down the street in his robes with a sanctimonious expression on his face and a cocked hat on his head two sizes too big for him. Double Alley’s laughter, in fact, was one of the ancient sanctions of democracy; and it was a good thing and a proper thing that Double Alley’s representatives should dress up once a year and submit to be tested in what is, after all, only a very ancient method of testing witch-doctors and kings.
    There were a few who failed to pass the test; and these were the occasion for the popular mirth. “‘Ere comes the Town Scoundrels!” Black Sal would cry; and then she would begin her obscene and libellous running commentary. She would announce
urbi et orbi
that Councillor X was desirous of sleepingwith the typist in the Borough Surveyor’s Office; that Councillor Y was only on the Council because he was anxious to prevent his slum cottages being condemned as uninhabitable. “Wot’s
’e
got ’imself elected for?” was her most devastating question; for say what you will about Double Alley, there wasn’t much wrong with its sense of values.
    There was only one criterion by which it judged the men who asked for its votes each November: were they disinterested or were they out for themselves? This question cut clean across all party politics, and Radicals would rather vote for a thoroughgoing dyed-in-the-wool Tory if they thought he was an honest man than for their own party’s representative whom they suspected of being a careerist. A “gentleman” could always get on the Town Council; not by reason of a preponderant Conservative vote but because the people thought that one possessing independent means was unlikely to seek election for what he could get out of it.
    Unfortunately, “gentlemen” rarely stood; the Council was discredited by its few careerists and slum landlords; and when, many years later, a lady actually dared to put up for election, the oldest, the wisest, and perhaps the crookedest of her opponents ingenuously warned her: “I’ll tell ’ee ’ow it be, Missus: the Town Council bain’t no fit place for a lady.”
    So it came about that a section of the Borough’s representatives was held in general contempt, or at any rate regarded with cynical amusement; and one of the annual church-going processions—it must have been the last before the Great War— provoked a remarkable gesture from the three warriors whom I have named Pistol, Bardolph and Nym. They had just come out of the pub; and the procession must have been returning from church, for the Town Band did not accompany it. Pistol, Bardolph and Nym, being slightly confused by drink, looked through bleary eyes at the solemn march-past of slow and shuffling feet and decided that a funeral was going by. They respectfully took off their caps. A moment later, however, they caught sight of the top hat and the blue uniform of the Town Crier, who was one of their cronies and with whom they wereaccustomed to get drunk. Horrified lest it should appear that they had taken off their caps out of deference to the Town Scoundrels, whom they despised, they hurriedly replaced their headgear and took council among themselves