It was all but arranged for me to give my "Humours of Parliament" before her late Majesty at Balmoral. I got as far as Aberdeen, but a death in the Royal Family put a stop to all entertainments.
SOME UNREHEARSED EFFECTS.
The dress suit and the regulation white tie are essential to those who appear in public upon the platform. Mr. Frederick Villiers, the popular war correspondent, is an exception to this rule. He appears in his campaigning attire, with his white helmet on and a water-bottle slung round him; but of course it would be somewhat incongruous for a man in evening dress, that emblem of civilisation and peace, more suggestive of the drawing-room than the battle-field, to dilate upon the platform on the horrors of campaigning, and to take you through the stirring scenes of "War on a White Sheet." It would be equally absurd for a lecturer on, say, "The Life and Habits of a Microbe," to be dressed in the garb of a backwoodsman; but I was once obliged to deliver a lecture on "Art" in a rough tweed suit.
It so happened that I was giving a series of lectures in the vicinity of Birmingham, and I was stopping with a friend of mine, the Director of the Art Gallery and Museum there. He suggested my leaving my Gladstone bag, containing my change of clothes, in his office, while I spent my day rummaging about old book shops for first editions and making calls on various friends. My host having had to go to London that day, I was left to my own devices, and it was about five o'clock in the evening when I went to the Museum for my belongings. To my horror I saw a notice up: "Museum closed at three o'clock on Wednesdays," and this was Wednesday! I rang and knocked, and knocked and rang, but all in vain. I crossed over to some other municipal buildings to see if there was anyone there who could help me out of my dilemma, but my spirits went down to zero when I was there informed that the custodian of the keys lived miles out of the town. Back I went to the Museum, fiercely plotting an ascent up the water-spout or a burglarious entrance through a back window, when, to my delight, I saw an attendant gesticulating to me from a window three or four stories from the ground. My time was running very short, so I rapidly explained to him the predicament I was in, and implored him to throw my bag out of the window. He told me that he was a prisoner locked in to look after the building, that there were three or four double-locked doors between him and the private office in which my coveted bag was lying, and wound up with the cheering announcement that my case was hopeless.
THE SURPRISE SHIRT.
I had only a few minutes left in which to catch my train. A glance at my cuffs showed me that one's linen has to be changed pretty frequently in a Midland town, so I made a frantic dive into a shirt-maker's.
"White shirt, turn-down collar. Look sharp!"
"Yes, sir; size round neck, sir?"
"Oh, thirty, forty—anything you like, only look sharp." Time was nearly up.