ng, and it only remained for them
to find out what the Something was. At present they had confused the
facts--an accident which will happen sometimes with the best-regulated
newspapers. But all of them had made shots at the truth, more or less
un-veracious. 'The Banner' asserted that Sir Charles Dilke and the
Democrat, arrayed in costumes of the beginning of the seventeenth
century for effect, were parading the cellars under the House of Lords,
after the manner of Guy Fawkes, laying trains of gunpowder and singing
the well-known lines about the fifth of November. The 'Daily Pulpit,'
on the other hand, declared that Lord Randolph Church-hill had set the
Thames on fire with native genius and a lighted fusee, which, on the
face of it, seemed so extremely probable, that all of the British
public that was not cheering the Army's arrival rushed to the bridges to
investigate the river. Delegates from the 'Holywell Street Gazette,' in
the meantime, were madly interviewing everything and everybody with
such celerity that the British public probably arrived at the truth of
matters somewhere about that journal's fifth edition. Up to this time,
unfortunately, the 'Gazette' had only been able to contradict flatly all
the statements of all its contemporaries in language, to say the least
of it, most emphatic. But at a national crisis one is nothing if not
emphatic. And this was a national crisis. And while the crowd was
rushing and swaying hither and thither, and the light-fingered brigade
was taking advantage of the crowd's absent-mindedness to borrow its
watches and pocket-handkerchiefs, the General, just returned from the
Desert, with the demeanour of a second Cromwell, was marching on the
House of Commons. In the House itself reigned confusion much worse
confounded. There was no time for lengthy recrimination, for in another
moment the General, alone, and with a mien of indignant resolution that
struck a chill to the hearts of the most irrepressible members,
was striding boldly up to the table. The Speaker looked at the
Serjeant-at-Arms, and the Serjeant-at-Arms looked at the Speaker, but
neither of them said a word. This was worse than Mr. Bradlaugh at his
worst.

'Behold in this handful of broken and wasted men, returned, not by
_your_ order, but by _mine_, to their native shore,' exclaimed the
General in a voice of stern thunder that reverberated through
the building, 'the result of your imbecile, idiotic, ignominious,
incomp