r heat.

At any time, and under any circumstances, the reigning Sovereign and
his Consort would have been received by a population so noted for its
sentiment of loyalty to the Throne as that of Ulster with demonstrations
of devotion exceeding the ordinary. But the present occasion was felt to
have a very special significance. The opening of Parliament by the King
in State is one of the most ancient and splendid of ceremonial pageants
illustrating the history of British institutions. It was felt in Ulster
that the association of this time-honoured ceremonial with the baptism,
so to speak, of the latest offspring of the Mother of Parliaments
stamped the Royal Seal upon the achievement of Ulster, and gave it a
dignity, prestige, and promise of permanence which might otherwise have
been lacking. No city in the United Kingdom had witnessed so many
extraordinary displays of popular enthusiasm in the last ten years as
Belfast, some of which had left on the minds of observers a firm belief
that such intensity of emotion in a great concourse of people could not
be exceeded. The scene in the streets when the King and Queen drove from
the quay, on the arrival of the royal yacht, to the City Hall, was held
by general consent to equal, since it could not surpass, any of those
great demonstrations of the past in popular fervour. At any rate,
persons of long experience in attendance on the Royal Family gave it as
their opinion in the evening that they had never before seen so
impressive a display of public devotion to the person of the Sovereign.

Two buildings in Belfast inseparably associated with Ulster's stand for
union, the City Hall and the Ulster Hall, were the scenes of the chief
events of the King's visit. The former, described by one of the English
correspondents as "easily the most magnificent municipal building in the
three Kingdoms,"[108] was placed at the disposal of the Ulster
Government by the Corporation for temporary use as a Parliament House.
The Council Chamber, a fine hall of dignified proportions with a dais
and canopied chair at the upper end, made an appropriate frame for the
ceremony of opening Parliament, and the arrangements both of the
Chamber itself and of the approaches and entrances to it made it a
simple matter to model the procedure as closely as possible on that
followed at Westminster.

Among the many distinguished people who assembled in the Ulster Capital
for the occasion, there was one notable a