, the Honourables Brush Bascom and Jake
Botcher.
For Mr. Crewe has not come to the Legislature, like the country members
in the rear, to acquire a smattering of parliamentary procedure by the
day the Speaker is presented with a gold watch, at the end of the
session. Not he! Not the practical business man, the member of boards,
the chairman and president of societies. He has studied the Rules of the
House and parliamentary law, you may be sure. Genius does not come
unprepared, and is rarely caught napping. After the Legislature
adjourned that week the following telegram was sent over the wires:--
Augustus P. Flint, New York.
Kindly use your influence with Doby to secure my committee
appointments. Important as per my conversation with you.
Humphrey Crewe.
Nor was Mr. Crewe idle from Saturday to Monday night, when the committees
were to be announced. He sent to the State Tribune office for fifty
copies of that valuable paper, which contained a two-column-and-a-half
article on Mr. Crewe as a legislator and financier and citizen, with a
summary of his bills and an argument as to how the State would benefit by
their adoption; an accurate list of Mr. Crewe's societies was inserted,
and an account of his life's history, and of those ancestors of his who
had been born or lived within the State. Indeed, the accuracy of this
article as a whole did great credit to the editor of the State Tribune,
who must have spent a tremendous amount of painstaking research upon it;
and the article was so good that Mr. Crewe regretted (undoubtedly for the
editor's sake) that a request could not be appended to it such as is used
upon marriage and funeral notices: "New York, Boston, and Philadelphia
papers please copy."
Mr. Crewe thought it his duty to remedy as much as possible the
unfortunate limited circulation of the article, and he spent as much as a
whole day making out a list of friends and acquaintances whom he thought
worthy to receive a copy of the Tribune--marked personal. Victoria Flint
got one, and read it to her father at the breakfast table. (Mr. Flint did
not open his.) Austen Vane wondered why any man in his obscure and
helpless position should have been honoured, but honoured he was. He sent
his to Victoria, too, and was surprised to find that she knew his
handwriting and wrote him a letter to thank him for it: a letter which
provoked on his part much laughter, and elements of other sens
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