The House was certainly all mouth for the moment, but, as I could feel, quite in earnest.  A Minister with a piece of typewritten paper seemed to be fending off volleys of insults.  He reminded me somehow of a nervous huntsman breaking up a fox in the face of rabid hounds.

‘It’s question-time.  They’re asking questions,’ said Ollyett.  ’Look!  Pallant’s up.’

There was no mistaking it.  His voice, which his enemies said was his one parliamentary asset, silenced the hubbub as toothache silences mere singing in the ears.  He said: 

’Arising out of that, may I ask if any special consideration has recently been shown in regard to any suspected outbreak of this disease on this side of the Channel?’

He raised his hand; it held a noon edition of The Bun.  We had thought it best to drop the paragraph out of the later ones.  He would have continued, but something in a grey frock-coat roared and bounded on a bench opposite, and waved another Bun.  It was Sir Thomas Ingell.

‘As the owner of the herd so dastardly implicated—­’ His voice was drowned in shouts of ’Order!’—­the Irish leading.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked Ollyett.  ’He’s got his hat on his head, hasn’t he?’

‘Yes, but his wrath should have been put as a question.’

‘Arising out of that, Mr. Speaker, Sirrr!’ Sir Thomas bellowed through a lull, ’are you aware that—­that all this is a conspiracy—­part of a dastardly conspiracy to make Huckley ridiculous—­to make us ridiculous?  Part of a deep-laid plot to make me ridiculous, Mr. Speaker, Sir!’

The man’s face showed almost black against his white whiskers, and he struck out swimmingly with his arms.  His vehemence puzzled and held the House for an instant, and the Speaker took advantage of it to lift his pack from Ireland to a new scent.  He addressed Sir Thomas Ingell in tones of measured rebuke, meant also, I imagine, for the whole House, which lowered its hackles at the word.  Then Pallant, shocked and pained:  ’I can only express my profound surprise that in response to my simple question the honourable member should have thought fit to indulge in a personal attack.  If I have in any way offended—­’

Again the Speaker intervened, for it appeared that he regulated these matters.

He, too, expressed surprise, and Sir Thomas sat back in a hush of reprobation that seemed to have the chill of the centuries behind it.  The Empire’s work was resumed.

‘Beautiful!’ said I, and I felt hot and cold up my back.

‘And now we’ll publish his letter,’ said Ollyett.

We did—­on the heels of his carefully reported outburst.  We made no comment.  With that rare instinct for grasping the heart of a situation which is the mark of the Anglo-Saxon, all our contemporaries and, I should say, two-thirds of our correspondents demanded how such a person could be made more ridiculous than he had already proved himself to be.  But beyond spelling his name ‘Injle,’ we alone refused to hit a man when he was down.