iting and wrote him a letter to thank him for
it: a letter which provoked on his part much laughter, and elements
of other sensations which, according to Charles Reade, should form the
ingredients of a good novel. But of this matter later.

Mrs. Pomfret and Alice each got one, and each wrote Mr. Crewe
appropriate congratulations. (Alice's answer supervised.) Mrs.
Chillingham got one; the Honourable Hilary Vane got one--marked in red
ink, lest he should have skipped it in his daily perusal of the
paper. Mr. Brush, Bascom got one likewise. But the list of Mr. Crewe's
acquaintances is too long and too broad to dwell upon further in these
pages.

The Monday-night session came at last, that sensational hour when the
Speaker makes those decisions to which he is supposed to have given
birth over Sunday in the seclusion of his country home at Hale.
Monday-night sessions are, as a rule, confined in attendance to the
Honourable Brush Bascom and Mr. Ridout and a few other conscientious
members who do not believe in cheating the State, but to-night all is
bustle and confusion, and at least four hundred members are pushing
down the aisles and squeezing past each other into the narrow seats,
and reading the State Tribune or the ringing words of the governor's
inaugural which they find in the racks on the back of the seats before
them. Speaker Doby, who has been apparently deep in conference with the
most important members (among them Mr. Crewe, to whom he has whispered
that a violent snow-storm is raging in Hale), raps for order; and after
a few preliminaries hands to Mr. Utter, the clerk, amidst a breathless
silence, the paper on which the parliamentary career of so many
ambitious statesmen depends.

It is not a pleasure to record the perfidy of man, nor the lack
of judgment which prevents him, in his circumscribed lights, from
recognizing undoubted geniuses when he sees them. Perhaps it was
jealousy on General Doby's part, and a selfish desire to occupy the
centre of the stage himself, but at any rate we will pass hastily over
the disagreeable portions of this narrative. Mr. Crewe settled himself
with his feet extended, and with a complacency which he had rightly
earned by leaving no stone unturned, to listen. He sat up a little when
the Appropriations Committee, headed by the Honourable Jake Botcher, did
not contain his name--but it might have been an oversight of Mr. Utters;
when the Judiciary (Mr. Ridout's committee) was read