Mr. Crewe thought it his duty to remedy as much as possible the unfortunate limited circulation of the article, and he spent as much as a whole day making out a list of friends and acquaintances whom he thought worthy to receive a copy of the Tribune—­marked personal.  Victoria Flint got one, and read it to her father at the breakfast table. (Mr. Flint did not open his.) Austen Vane wondered why any man in his obscure and helpless position should have been honoured, but honoured he was.  He sent his to Victoria, too, and was surprised to find that she knew his handwriting and wrote him a letter to thank him for it:  a letter which provoked on his part much laughter, and elements of other sensations which, according to Charles Reade, should form the ingredients of a good novel.  But of this matter later.

Mrs. Pomfret and Alice each got one, and each wrote Mr. Crewe appropriate congratulations. (Alice’s answer supervised.) Mrs. Chillingham got one; the Honourable Hilary Vane got one—­marked in red ink, lest he should have skipped it in his daily perusal of the paper.  Mr. Brush, Bascom got one likewise.  But the list of Mr. Crewe’s acquaintances is too long and too broad to dwell upon further in these pages.

The Monday-night session came at last, that sensational hour when the Speaker makes those decisions to which he is supposed to have given birth over Sunday in the seclusion of his country home at Hale.  Monday-night sessions are, as a rule, confined in attendance to the Honourable Brush Bascom and Mr. Ridout and a few other conscientious members who do not believe in cheating the State, but to-night all is bustle and confusion, and at least four hundred members are pushing down the aisles and squeezing past each other into the narrow seats, and reading the State Tribune or the ringing words of the governor’s inaugural which they find in the racks on the back of the seats before them.  Speaker Doby, who has been apparently deep in conference with the most important members (among them Mr. Crewe, to whom he has whispered that a violent snow-storm is raging in Hale), raps for order; and after a few preliminaries hands to Mr. Utter, the clerk, amidst a breathless silence, the paper on which the parliamentary career of so many ambitious statesmen depends.

It is not a pleasure to record the perfidy of man, nor the lack of judgment which prevents him, in his circumscribed lights, from recognizing undoubted geniuses when he sees them.  Perhaps it was jealousy on General Doby’s part, and a selfish desire to occupy the centre of the stage himself, but at any rate we will pass hastily over the disagreeable portions of this narrative.  Mr. Crewe settled himself with his feet extended, and with a complacency which he had rightly earned by leaving no stone unturned, to listen.  He sat up a little when the Appropriations Committee, headed by the Honourable Jake Botcher, did not contain his name—­but it might have been an oversight of Mr. Utters; when the Judiciary