n this great year were within reach of the most modest
purse. But at night, entertainment is more costly. Along the Terrace
there is now, as everybody knows, a series of small dining-rooms; and
here every night you might have listened to the pleasant music of
woman's laughter, punctuated by the pop of the champagne bottle. Time
was--I remember it well--when a member of Parliament who knew that
there was any place where a lady could get something to eat was pointed
to as a Parliamentary marvel, who knew his way about in an uncanny
fashion; when the room in which a lady could dine had been seen by but
few eyes and, indeed, was little better than a coalhole, low-roofed,
dimly lit, buried in dark and deep recesses of an underworld of the
House of Commons, as little known to the general member as the sewage
catacombs of London to the ordinary citizen. But all this has been
changed; and now the dinner to ladies at the House of Commons has
become, like the afternoon tea, one of the best recognized of London's
social festivities. And so great is the run on these dinners that it
takes a week's--or even two weeks'--notice to secure a table. Mr.
Cobbe--a stern and unbending Radical, with a hot temper and unsparing
tongue--might have been seen one of those June days with a menacing
frown upon his rugged Radical forehead, and by-and-bye in serious
converse with the Speaker. And the cause of his anger was that he had
found all the dining-tables ordered for two weeks ahead.

[Sidenote: A wild scene.]

Speaking on the Freemasons, on June 22nd, Mr. Gladstone related the
interesting autobiographical fact that he himself was not a Freemason,
and never had been; and, indeed, having been fully occupied
otherwise--this delicate allusion to that vast life of never-ending
work--of gigantic enterprises--of solemn and sublime responsibilities,
was much relished--he never had had sufficient curiosity to make any
particular inquiries as to what Freemasonry really was. I don't know
what came over Mr. Balfour--some people thought it was because he
expected to detach some Freemason votes from the Liberal side; but he
was guilty of what I admit is an unusual thing with him--an intentional,
a gross, an almost shameful misrepresentation of Mr. Gladstone's words.
Making the same interesting personal statement as Mr. Gladstone, that he
was not himself a Freemason, he went on to suggest that Mr. Gladstone
had made a comparison between a fraudulent Liberat