said
the working men,--no Committee of the House would have been able to
make anything of him. They might have asked him questions week after
week, and he would have answered them all fluently and would have
committed nobody. He knew all the ins and outs of governing,--did
Mr. Thomas Smith,--and was a match for the sharpest Committee that
ever sat at Westminster. Poor Sir Marmaduke was a man of a very
different sort; all of which was known by the working men; but
the Parliamentary interest had been too strong, and here was Sir
Marmaduke at home. But the working men were not disposed to make
matters so pleasant for Sir Marmaduke, as Sir Marmaduke had expected.
The Committee would not examine Sir Marmaduke till after Easter, in
the middle of April; but it was expected of him that he should read
blue-books without number, and he was so catechised by the working
men that he almost began to wish himself back at the Mandarins. In
this way the new establishment in Manchester Street was not at first
in a happy or even in a contented condition.

At last, after about ten days, Lady Rowley did succeed in obtaining
an interview with Trevelyan. A meeting was arranged through Bozzle,
and took place in a very dark and gloomy room at an inn in the City.
Why Bozzle should have selected the Bremen Coffee House, in Poulter's
Alley, for this meeting no fit reason can surely be given, unless
it was that he conceived himself bound to select the most dreary
locality within his knowledge on so melancholy an occasion. Poulter's
Alley is a narrow dark passage somewhere behind the Mansion House;
and the Bremen Coffee House,--why so called no one can now tell,--is
one of those strange houses of public resort in the City at which
the guests seem never to eat, never to drink, never to sleep, but to
come in and out after a mysterious and almost ghostly fashion, seeing
their friends,--or perhaps their enemies, in nooks and corners, and
carrying on their conferences in low, melancholy whispers. There is
an aged waiter at the Bremen Coffee House; and there is certainly
one private sitting-room up-stairs. It was a dingy, ill-furnished
room, with an old large mahogany table, an old horse-hair sofa, six
horse-hair chairs, two old round mirrors, and an old mahogany press
in a corner. It was a chamber so sad in its appearance that no
wholesome useful work could have been done within it; nor could men
have eaten there with any appetite, or have drained the f