orts, and especially for hunting. He
allows no such attractions to interfere with diligent attention to the
business of the House of Commons. He serves in Committees, he takes the
chair at public meetings on sanitary questions or projects for social
improvement, and acquits himself well therein. He has not yet spoken in
debate, but he has only been two years in Parliament, and he takes his
father's wise advice not to speak till the third. But he is not without
weight among the well-born youth of the party, and has in him the stuff
out of which, when it becomes seasoned, the Corinthian capitals of a
Cabinet may be very effectively carved. In his own heart he is convinced
that his party are going too far and too fast; but with that party he
goes on light-heartedly, and would continue to do so if they went to
Erebus. But he would prefer their going the other way. For the rest, a
pleasant, bright-eyed young fellow, with vivid animal spirits; and, in
the holiday moments of reprieve from public duty he brings sunshine into
draggling hunting-fields, and a fresh breeze into heated ballrooms.

"My dear fellow," said Lord Thetford, as he threw aside his cigar, "I
quite understand that you bore yourself: you have nothing else to do."

"What can I do?"

"Work."

"Work!"

"Yes, you are clever enough to feel that you have a mind; and mind is a
restless inmate of body: it craves occupation of some sort, and regular
occupation too; it needs its daily constitutional exercise. Do you give
your mind that?"

"I am sure I don't know, but my mind is always busying itself about
something or other."

"In a desultory way,--with no fixed object."

"True."

"Write a book, and then it will have its constitutional."

"Nay, my mind is always writing a book (though it may not publish
one), always jotting down impressions, or inventing incidents, or
investigating characters; and between you and me, I do not think that I
do bore myself so much as I did formerly. Other people bore me more than
they did."

"Because you will not create an object in common with other people: come
into Parliament, side with a party, and you have that object."

"Do you mean seriously to tell me that you are not bored in the House of
Commons?"

"With the speakers very often, yes; but with the strife between the
speakers, no. The House of Commons life has a peculiar excitement
scarcely understood out of it; but you may conceive its charm when you
observe that