t here," he
said, "advocating the case of a mere ordinary client of whom I have
little or no knowledge. I hold a brief to-night for my brothers. I went
into the gallery of the House of Commons as a parliamentary reporter
when I was a boy, and I left it--I can hardly believe the inexorable
truth--nigh thirty years ago. I have pursued the calling of a reporter
under circumstances of which many of my brethren here can form no
adequate conception. I have often transcribed for the printer, from my
short-hand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest
accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young
man severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light
of a dark-lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild
country, and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate
of fifteen miles an hour. The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled
into the castle-yard there, to identify, for the amusement of a friend,
the spot on which I once 'took,' as we used to call it, an
election-speech of Lord John Russell at the Devon contest, in the midst
of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of
the county, and under such a pelting rain that I remember two
good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a
pocket-handkerchief over my note-book, after the manner of a state
canopy in an ecclesiastical procession. I have worn my knees by writing
on them on the old back row of the old gallery of the old House of
Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous
pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like
so many sheep,--kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want
restuffing. Returning home from exciting political meetings in the
country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been
upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I
have been, in my time, belated on miry by-roads, towards the small
hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless carriage, with
exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for
publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late
Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts
I ever knew. These trivial things I mention as an assurance to you that
I never have forgotten the fascination of that old pursuit. The pleasure
that I used to