swimmingly with his arms. His vehemence puzzled and held the
House for an instant, and the Speaker took advantage of it to lift his
pack from Ireland to a new scent. He addressed Sir Thomas Ingell in
tones of measured rebuke, meant also, I imagine, for the whole House,
which lowered its hackles at the word. Then Pallant, shocked and pained:
'I can only express my profound surprise that in response to my simple
question the honourable member should have thought fit to indulge in a
personal attack. If I have in any way offended--'

Again the Speaker intervened, for it appeared that he regulated these
matters.

He, too, expressed surprise, and Sir Thomas sat back in a hush of
reprobation that seemed to have the chill of the centuries behind it.
The Empire's work was resumed.

'Beautiful!' said I, and I felt hot and cold up my back.

'And now we'll publish his letter,' said Ollyett.

We did--on the heels of his carefully reported outburst. We made no
comment. With that rare instinct for grasping the heart of a situation
which is the mark of the Anglo-Saxon, all our contemporaries and, I
should say, two-thirds of our correspondents demanded how such a person
could be made more ridiculous than he had already proved himself to be.
But beyond spelling his name 'Injle,' we alone refused to hit a man when
he was down.

'There's no need,' said Ollyett. 'The whole press is on the buckle from
end to end.'

Even Woodhouse was a little astonished at the ease with which it had
come about, and said as much.

'Rot!' said Ollyett. 'We haven't really begun. Huckley isn't news yet.'

'What do you mean?' said Woodhouse, who had grown to have great respect
for his young but by no means distant connection.

'Mean? By the grace of God, Master Ridley, I mean to have it so that
when Huckley turns over in its sleep, Reuters and the Press Association
jump out of bed to cable.' Then he went off at score about certain
restorations in Huckley Church which, he said--and he seemed to spend
his every week-end there--had been perpetrated by the Rector's
predecessor, who had abolished a 'leper-window' or a 'squinch-hole'
(whatever these may be) to institute a lavatory in the vestry. It did
not strike me as stuff for which Reuters or the Press Association would
lose much sleep, and I left him declaiming to Woodhouse about a
fourteenth-century font which, he said, he had unearthed in the sexton's
tool-shed.

My methods were more on the lines o