"You see how much prayer means here," said Radbourn.
A good deal of the business which followed was similar in character to the proceedings at Des Moines. Resolutions were passed with two or three aye votes and no noes at all, while the rest of the members looked over the Record, read the morning papers, or wrote on busily. The speaker declared each motion carried with glib voice.
At last a special order brought up an unfinished debate upon some matter, and the five minute rule was enforced.
"You're in luck," said Radbourn. "The whole procession is going to pass before you."
As the debate went on he pointed out the great men whose names suggested history to Bradley and whose actual presence amazed him. There was Amos B. Tripp, whom Radbourn said resembled "a Chinese god"—immense, featureless, bald, with a pout on his face like an enormous baby. The "watch dog of the house," Major Hendricks, was tall, thin, with the voice and manner of an old woman. His eyes were invisible, and his chin-beard wagged up and down as he shouted in high tenor his inevitable objection.
An old man with abundant hair, blue-white under the perpendicular light, arose at the back part of the room, making a fine picture outlined against the deep red screen. His manner was courtly, his ruddy face pleasing, his voice musical and impassioned.
"He's the dress parade orator of the house," observed Radbourn.
"I like him," said Bradley, leaning forward to absorb the speaker's torrent of impassioned utterance. When he sat down the members applauded.
Most of the orators conformed to types familiar to Bradley. There was the legal type, monotonously emphatic, with extended forefinger, which pointed, threatened and delineated. His speaking wore on the ear like a saw-filing. Then there was the political speaker, the stump orator, who was full of well-worn phrases, who could not mention the price of wool or the number of cotton bales without using the ferocious throaty-snarl of a beast of prey.
He was followed by the clerical type, a speaker who used the most mournful cadences in correcting the gentleman on his left as to the number of cotton bales. His voice and manner formed a distinct reflection of the mournful preacher, and the tune of his high voice had the power of calling up the exact phraseology of sermons—"Repent, my lost brother, ere it be too late," "Prepare for the last great day, my brother," while he actually asserted the number of cotton bales had been grossly over-stated by the gentleman from Alabama.