FELINE AMENITIES.
"Are you going to the Browns' Dance?"
"No. I haven't been asked."
"Oh—I suppose it's quite a Young People's Dance, you know!"
ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT.
Extracted from the Diary of Toby, M.P.
House of Commons, Monday, May 20.—James Galloway Weir is a sore man the night. Ross and Cromarty hide their diminished head—or should it be heads?—before the illuminated mountain tops of Inverness-shire. The MacGregor has done him at last, done him hopelessly. Since the present Parliament met, he and The MacGregor have run pretty evenly, neck and neck in race to show what Scotland can do in this way when it concentrates its mighty mind on the effort. In former times Ireland had monopoly of the Crank as he was returned to Parliament. Scotch Members preserved traditional reputation of their country as the home of dour-headed businesslike men. Weir standing alone would have sufficed to tear this fable to tatters. The MacGregor unaided would have confounded the tradition. The combination of talent was irresistible, overpowering in its force of conviction.
Between these eminent men there has been, from the first, a feeling of generous rivalry. The MacGregor, as befitted the riper genius, has been more successful in concealing it. Whenever he has put a question about the Crofters, Weir has managed to drop in with supplementary inquiry. His name appearing in the report, watchful Scotia would take note that The MacGregor was not the only one of her sons who, in a foreign land, cared for her interests. The MacGregor, on the contrary, not less loftily because without apparent design, ignored Weir. There is reason to believe he did not regard with fullest measure of appreciation his intellectual capacity, his business aptitude, or his parliamentary manner.
"A puir creature!" he said, one night, staring straight up at the gaslit roof. There was no one up there at the moment, and as this happened to be the night when Weir had eleven questions on the paper, by way of showing his want of confidence in the Government, and was approaching the ninth with ever deepening chest notes, there is too much reason to fear that at that moment the Member for Inverness-shire was not unconscious of the existence of the Member for Ross and Cromarty.