There is a striking description in one of Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s stories of a night in an Indian city when the dog star rages.  Luridly, but vigorously, the author brings home to you the odious discomfort, the awful suffering, and, finally, the morose anger and almost homicidal fury, which the sweltering light produces in the waking soldiers.  This would have been something like the temper of the House of Commons on June 18th, if that assembly had not recently discovered methods of saving its temper and pleasantly spending its vacant hours.  For the dog star—­raging, merciless, sweltering—­ruled everywhere within Westminster Palace.  On the floor of the House itself, men sweltered and mopped their foreheads; in even the recesses of the still library they groaned aloud; then down on the Terrace, and with the river sweeping by, there was not a particle of air; and the heat of all the day had made even the stony floor of that beautiful walk almost like the tiles of a red-hot oven.  In short, it was a day when one felt one’s own poor tenement of clay a misery, a nuisance, and a burden; and the mind, morose, black, and despondent, had distracting visions of distant mirages by the seashore or under green trees.  It was natural, under such circumstances, that everybody who could should desert the House of Commons.  And this sudden desertion of the House will be always remembered as one of the many peculiarities of the Annus Mirabilis through which we are passing.  It has not been unusual for some years for members to take a turn on the Terrace now and then.  I have paced its floor at every hour of the night and the day—­from the still midnight to the delightful moments before breaking day; and I still remember the beautiful summery morning when, after a hard night’s fight, an Irish member rushed down to the Terrace to tell Mr. Sexton and myself that we were just being suspended—­an operation not yet grown customary.  But this Session the majority of the House of Commons is always on the Terrace; and woman—­that sleuth-hound of every new pleasure—­has discovered this great fact, and utilised it accordingly.

[Sidenote:  Tea on the Terrace.]

The afternoon tea—­the strawberries and cream which make a coolness and delight in the midst of the raging day—­has been erected by woman into one of London’s daily social events; and though the novelist has not discovered the fact up to this moment—­Mr. McCarthy has made a very pretty love scene on the Terrace, but it is at the witching hour of night—­though this discovery has yet to come, the respite is brief, and in a short time we shall have the hero and the heroine passing through all the agonies of three-volume suffering, to the accompaniment of the division bell and the small tea-table of the Terrace.  But though woman has many slaves she has her watchful enemies.  The great order of curmudgeon is wide and vigilant and crusty, and the curmudgeon has found that the vast crowds of ladies who have invaded the Terrace