ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT.
EXTRACTED FROM THE DIARY OF TOBY, M.P.
House of Commons, Monday, June 10.—School reopened after Whitsun Holidays. Occasion marked by lamentable episode. Attendance, as usual on Black Monday, very small. Speaker took Chair at three o'clock. No private business on hand; nothing to be done till half-past three. Meanwhile, Speaker and Members sit with hands folded.
Everyone knows the temptation of such opportunity for a nameless Personage. Tommy's idle hands instinctively clutched after mischief. Suppose he were to move to have House counted? Evidently not forty present; nothing very serious would follow. Speaker would count. If not forty on hand, would leave Chair, sit at table, and wait till they came. Or he would go off, come back any time before four when message brought in that a quorum was in sight. Still, it would be a lark; would startle the House, frighten Ministers, possibly postpone commencement of business by half an hour.
Cap'en just rising with intent to observe that there are not forty Members present, when happier thought struck him. Why not get some landsman to do the trick? The more venerable and venerated the agent the better. Tommy knows himself to be a wicked old salt. House not shocked now at anything he does. Half the fun gone if he played this prank himself. Shifting his quid and scanning horizon, noted in his place Sir Richard Temple, Bart., G.C.S.I., late Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, once Governor of Bombay, sometime Chief Commissioner of Central Provinces of India.
The very man for the job. Buttonholing him with his hook, Cap'en Tommy opened his little plot. Temple aghast at first. Never known such a thing done, and the like. Tommy jawed away, twisting Temple round the tip of his hook like a marlingspike on a flying jibboom. Convinced him that public duty called for sacrifice of private prejudices. Having squared Temple, Tommy got men near him to walk out before House was counted, so as to reduce chances of quorum.
Bell rang; Members rushed in; Ministers huddled on Treasury Bench like flock of frightened sheep. Tommy, looking down from shrouds in Strangers' Gallery, carefully counted.
"Only thirty two," he said. "Done it!"