Astonished to hear that my colleague had fallen into this disfavor with his constitutents, I was not slow in asking an explanation.
The captain affirmed that the matter was beyond the reach of any explanation it was in his power to give.

He had voted in the affair of the causeway, in strict conformity with the dictates of his conscience, and yet here was the whole population accusing him of bribery--nay, even the journals had openly flouted at him for what they called his barefaced and flagrant corruption.

Here the captain laid before us six or seven of the leading journals of Bivouac, in all of which his late vote was treated with quite as little ceremony as if it had been an unequivocal act of sheep-stealing.
I looked at my friend the brigadier for an explanation.

After running his eye over the articles in the journals, the latter smiled, and cast a look of commiseration at our colleague.
"You have certainly committed a grave fault here, my friend," he said, "and one that is seldom forgiven in Leaplow--perhaps I might say never, during the occultation of the great moral postulate, as happens to be the case at present." "Tell me my sins at once, brigadier," cried Noah, with the look of a martyr, "and put me out of pain." "You have forgotten to display a motive for your stand during the late hot discussion; and, as a matter of course, the community ascribes the worst that monikin ingenuity can devise.

Such an oversight would ruin even a God-like!" "But, my dear Mr.Downright," I kindly interposed, "our colleague, in this instance, is supposed to have acted on principle." The brigadier looked up, turning his nose into the air, like a pup that has not yet opened its eyes, and then intimated that he could not see the quality I had named, it being obscured by the passage of the orb of Pecuniary Interest before its disc.