over and over again, until I loathed Bishop Heber for having written the lines.  They even asked the captain how far out to sea the spicy breezes would be perceptible.  I suddenly got an idea, and, going below, I obtained from the steward half a dozen nutmegs and a handful of cinnamon.  I grated the nutmegs and pounded the cinnamon up, and then, with one hand full of each, I went on deck, and walked slowly up and down in front of the American tourists.  Soon I heard an ecstatic cry, “My dear, I distinctly smelt spice then!” Another turn, and another jubilant exclamation:  “It’s quite true about the spicy breezes.  I got a delicious whiff just then.  Who would have thought that they would have carried so far out to sea?” A sceptical elderly gentleman was summoned from below, and he, after a while, was reluctantly forced to avow that he, too, had noticed the spicy fragrance.  No wonder! when I had about a quarter of a pound of grated nutmeg in one hand, and as much pounded cinnamon in the other.  Now these people will go on declaring to the end of their lives that they smelt the spicy odours of Ceylon a full hundred miles out at sea, just as the travelling M.P. will assert that a tree in India produces a very good imitation of red wine.  It is a nice point determining how far one is morally responsible oneself for the unconscious falsehoods into which these people have been betrayed.  I should like to have had the advice of Mrs. Fairchild, of the Fairchild Family upon this delicate question.  I feel convinced that that estimable lady, with her inexhaustible repertory of supplications, would instantly have recited by heart “a prayer against the temptation to lead others into uttering untruths unconsciously,” which would have met the situation adequately, for not once in the book, when appealed to, did she fail to produce a lengthy and elaborately worded petition, adapted to the most unexpected emergencies, and I feel confident that her moral armoury would have included a prayer against tendencies to “leg-pulling.”

To return to the London of the “seventies” and “eighties” after this brief journey to the East, nothing is more noticeable than the way public interest in Parliamentary proceedings has vanished.  When I was a boy, all five of the great London dailies, The Times, Morning Post, Standard, Daily Telegraph, and Daily News, published the fullest reports of Parliamentary news, and the big provincial dailies followed their example.  Every one then seemed to follow the proceedings of Parliament with the utmost interest; even at Harrow the elder boys read the Parliamentary news and discussed it, and I have heard keen-witted Lancashire artisans eagerly debating the previous night’s Parliamentary encounters.  Now the most popular newspapers give the scantiest and baldest summaries of proceedings in the House of Commons.  It is an editor’s business to know the tastes of his readers; if Parliamentary reports are reduced to a minimum, it must be because they no longer interest