"We have no Upper House with us, my lord," said I.
"You have got rid, at any rate, of one terrible bother. I daresay we shall drop it before long in England. I don't see why we should continue to sit merely to register the edicts of the House of Commons, and be told that we're a pack of fools when we hesitate." I told him that it was the unfortunate destiny of a House of Lords to be made to see her own unfitness for legislative work.
"But if we were abolished," continued he, "then I might get into the other place and do something. You have to be elected a Peer of Parliament, or you can sit nowhere. A ship can only be a ship, after all; but if we must live in a ship, we are not so bad here. Come and take some tiffin." An Englishman, when he comes to our side of the globe, always calls his lunch tiffin.
I went back to the other room with Lord Marylebone; and as I took my place at the table, I heard that the assembled cricketers were all discussing the Fixed Period.
"I'd be shot," said Mr Puddlebrane, "if they should deposit me, and bleed me to death, and cremate me like a big pig." Then he perceived that I had entered the saloon, and there came a sudden silence across the table.
"What sort of wind will be blowing next Friday at two o'clock?" asked Sir Lords Longstop.
It was evident that Sir Lords had only endeavoured to change the conversation because of my presence; and it did not suit me to allow them to think that I was afraid to talk of the Fixed Period. "Why should you object to be cremated, Mr Puddlebrane," said I, "whether like a big pig or otherwise? It has not been suggested that any one shall cremate you while alive."
"Because my father and mother were buried. And all the Puddlebranes were always buried. There are they, all to be seen in Puddlebrane Church, and I should like to appear among them."
"I suppose it's only their names that appear, and not their bodies, Mr Puddlebrane. And a cremated man may have as big a tombstone as though he had been allowed to become rotten in the orthodox fashion."
"What Puddlebrane means is," said another, "that he'd like to have the same chance of living as his ancestors."