ivy Seal had refused to work out decimal
coinage under the management, in the House of Commons, of the
President of the Board of Trade.

Mr. Bonteen, in his troubled spirit, certainly did misbehave himself.
Among his closer friends he declared very loudly that he didn't mean
to stand it. He had not chosen to throw Mr. Gresham over at once, or
to make difficulties at the moment;--but he would not continue to
hold his present position or to support the Government without a seat
in the Cabinet. Palliser had become quite useless,--so Mr. Bonteen
said,--since his accession to the dukedom, and was quite unfit to
deal with decimal coinage. It was a burden to kill any man, and he
was not going to kill himself,--at any rate without the reward for
which he had been working all his life, and to which he was fully
entitled, namely, a seat in the Cabinet. Now there were Bonteenites
in those days as well as Phineas Finnites. The latter tribe was for
the most part feminine; but the former consisted of some half-dozen
members of Parliament, who thought they saw their way in encouraging
the forlorn hope of the unhappy financier.

A leader of a party is nothing without an organ, and an organ came
forward to support Mr. Bonteen,--not very creditable to him as a
Liberal, being a Conservative organ,--but not the less gratifying to
his spirit, inasmuch as the organ not only supported him, but exerted
its very loudest pipes in abusing the man whom of all men he hated
the most. The _People's Banner_ was the organ, and Mr. Quintus Slide
was, of course, the organist. The following was one of the tunes he
played, and was supposed by himself to be a second thunderbolt, and
probably a conclusively crushing missile. This thunderbolt fell on
Monday, the 3rd of May:--

Early in last March we found it to be our duty to bring
under public notice the conduct of the member for
Tankerville in reference to a transaction which took place
at a small hotel in Judd Street, and as to which we then
ventured to call for the interference of the police. An
attempt to murder the member for Tankerville had been made
by a gentleman once well known in the political world,
who,--as it is supposed,--had been driven to madness by
wrongs inflicted on him in his dearest and nearest family
relations. That the unfortunate gentleman is now insane we
believe we may state as a fact. It had become our special
duty to refer to this most di