“There they sit with ranks unbroken, cheering on the fierce debate,
    Till the sunrise lights them homeward as they tramp through
       Storey’s Gate,
    Racked with headache, pale and haggard, worn by nights of endless
       talk,
    While the early sparrows twitter all along the Birdcage Walk.”

Some ardent souls there are who, if report speaks true, are not content with even this amount of exertion and excitement, but finish the night, or begin the day, with a rubber at the club or even a turn at baccarat.  However, we are describing, not choice spirits or chartered viveurs, but the blameless Minister, whose whole life during the Parliamentary session is the undeviating and conscientious discharge of official duty; and he, when he lays his head upon his respectable pillow any time after 1 a.m., may surely go to sleep in the comfortable consciousness that he has done a fair day’s work for a not exorbitant remuneration.

FOOTNOTES: 

[35] 1897.

[36] The word “conservative” here applies only to official routine.  The Civil Service has no politics, but many of its members are staunch Liberals.

[37] Spencer Compton, 8th Duke.

XXXIV.

AN OLD PHOTOGRAPH-BOOK.

The diary from which these Recollections have been mainly gathered dates from my thirteenth year, and it has lately received some unexpected illustrations.  In turning out the contents of a neglected cupboard, I stumbled on a photograph-book which I filled while I was a boy at a Public School.  The school has lately been described under the name of Lyonness,[38] and that name will serve as well as another.  The book had been mislaid years ago, and when it accidentally came to light a strange aroma of old times seemed still to hang about it.  Inside and out, it was reminiscent of a life in which for five happy years I bore my part.  Externally the book showed manifest traces of a schoolboy’s ownership, in broken corners; plentiful ink-stains, from exercises and punishments; droppings of illicit candle grease, consumed long after curfew-time; round marks like fairy rings on a greensward, which indicated the standpoint of extinct jam pots—­where are those jam pots now?  But, while the outside of the book spoke thus, as it were, by innuendo and suggestion, the inside seemed to shout with joyous laughter or chuckle with irreverent mirth; or murmured, in tones lower perhaps, but certainly not less distinct, of things which were neither joyous nor mirthful.