talk,
While the early sparrows twitter all along the Birdcage Walk."

Some ardent souls there are who, if report speaks true, are not content
with even this amount of exertion and excitement, but finish the night,
or begin the day, with a rubber at the club or even a turn at baccarat.
However, we are describing, not choice spirits or chartered _viveurs_,
but the blameless Minister, whose whole life during the Parliamentary
session is the undeviating and conscientious discharge of official duty;
and he, when he lays his head upon his respectable pillow any time after
1 a.m., may surely go to sleep in the comfortable consciousness that he
has done a fair day's work for a not exorbitant remuneration.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] 1897.

[36] The word "conservative" here applies only to official routine. The
Civil Service has no politics, but many of its members are staunch
Liberals.

[37] Spencer Compton, 8th Duke.

XXXIV.

AN OLD PHOTOGRAPH-BOOK.

The diary from which these Recollections have been mainly gathered dates
from my thirteenth year, and it has lately received some unexpected
illustrations. In turning out the contents of a neglected cupboard, I
stumbled on a photograph-book which I filled while I was a boy at a
Public School. The school has lately been described under the name of
Lyonness,[38] and that name will serve as well as another. The book had
been mislaid years ago, and when it accidentally came to light a strange
aroma of old times seemed still to hang about it. Inside and out, it was
reminiscent of a life in which for five happy years I bore my part.
Externally the book showed manifest traces of a schoolboy's ownership,
in broken corners; plentiful ink-stains, from exercises and punishments;
droppings of illicit candle grease, consumed long after curfew-time;
round marks like fairy rings on a greensward, which indicated the
standpoint of extinct jam pots--where are those jam pots now? But, while
the outside of the book spoke thus, as it were, by innuendo and
suggestion, the inside seemed to shout with joyous laughter or chuckle
with irreverent mirth; or murmured, in tones lower perhaps, but
certainly not less distinct, of things which were neither joyous nor
mirthful.

The book had been carefully arranged. As I turned over the leaves,
there came back the memory of holiday-evenings and the interested
questionings of sisters over each new face or scene; and the kind
fingers which did