‘This is bad!’ Woodhouse whispered.  ’There’ll be a row before they’ve finished.  Look at the Front Benches!’ And he pointed out little personal signs by which I was to know that each man was on edge.  He might have spared himself.  The House was ready to snap before a bone had been thrown.  A sullen minister rose to reply to a staccato question.  His supporters cheered defiantly.  ‘None o’ that!  None o’ that!’ came from the Back Benches.  I saw the Speaker’s face stiffen like the face of a helmsman as he humours a hard-mouthed yacht after a sudden following sea.  The trouble was barely met in time.  There came a fresh, apparently causeless gust a few minutes later—­savage, threatening, but futile.  It died out—­one could hear the sigh—­in sudden wrathful realisation of the dreary hours ahead, and the ship of state drifted on.

Then Pallant—­and the raw House winced at the torture of his voice—­rose.  It was a twenty-line question, studded with legal technicalities.  The gist of it was that he wished to know whether the appropriate Minister was aware that there had been a grave miscarriage of justice on such and such a date, at such and such a place, before such and such justices of the peace, in regard to a case which arose—­

I heard one desperate, weary ‘damn!’ float up from the pit of that torment.  Pallant sawed on—­’out of certain events which occurred at the village of Huckley.’

The House came to attention with a parting of the lips like a hiccough, and it flashed through my mind....  Pallant repeated, ’Huckley.  The village—­’

‘That voted the Earth was flat.’  A single voice from a back Bench sang it once like a lone frog in a far pool.

‘Earth was flat,’ croaked another voice opposite.

‘Earth was flat.’  There were several.  Then several more.

It was, you understand, the collective, overstrained nerve of the House, snapping, strand by strand to various notes, as the hawser parts from its moorings.

‘The Village that voted the Earth was flat.’  The tune was beginning to shape itself.  More voices were raised and feet began to beat time.  Even so it did not occur to me that the thing would—­

‘The Village that voted the Earth was flat!’ It was easier now to see who were not singing.  There were still a few.  Of a sudden (and this proves the fundamental instability of the cross-bench mind) a cross-bencher leaped on his seat and there played an imaginary double-bass with tremendous maestro-like wagglings of the elbow.

The last strand parted.  The ship of state drifted out helpless on the rocking tide of melody.

     ’The Village that voted the Earth was flat! 
      The Village that voted the Earth was flat!’