receipt of twelve hundred a year. You see the
gallery under the Strangers' Gallery in which peers, and members' sons,
and old M.P.'s occasionally sit; and now and then, through the glass door
by which members enter, you see a bonnet, a bit of muslin--the lustre of
some female eye--denoting that woman in her loveliness is taking note of
the Conscript Fathers. This reminds us that the Reporters' Gallery is
just under the little cage in which the British fair are confined during
a debate. The consequence is to some of the reporters who wear
moustaches, and cultivate the art of killing--who get themselves up in a
very different style to your fathers of families--a Barmecide feast of
the most cruel kind. They hear the murmur of female voices, not always
"gentle and low"--they know that, shining like stars above them, are
forms such as "might melt the saintship of an anchorite;" that above them
are eyes more eloquent than the tongues below, but they cannot realise
what they can imagine; and whilst music comes to them--

"Like ocean which upon the moonlight shores
Of lone Sigaeum steals with murmuring noise,"

they must take down the common sense of common men; such is their cruel
fate. And now one word about our companions. Most of them are young
men--some are in their prime. None of them are old; old reporters are
only met with where dead donkeys and departed postboys are common. At
any rate they are not engaged on the morning papers: the late hours, the
hard stretch of mind required in a reporter, don't exactly suit old men.
If you think reporting easy, my good sir, you are most egregiously
mistaken. It takes you two or three years to master shorthand
sufficiently to assume your place as a reporter in the gallery. When you
have done that, you will find that you don't get your money for nothing,
I can assure you. You must for half an hour take down all you can hear;
you must then copy that out into long-hand and plain English as best you
can. You must then come back into the house and take another turn, and
so on, till the house is up; and then, worn and weary, you must again
trudge to the office, and there indite the copy which, before the ink
with which it is written is dry, is in the composing-room and in type.
As this may detain you till four o'clock in the morning, you are then at
liberty to retire to your bed, if it suit you, or to the flowers and
early purl of Covent Garden, if it be summer time,