out predestination;
about men who are striving and learning and soberly voting upon measures
with which they have as little to do as guinea-pigs. There were certain
wise and cynical atheists who did not attend the sessions at all except
when they received mysterious hints to do so. These were chiefly from
Newcastle. And there were others who played poker in the state-house
cellar waiting for the Word to come to them, when they went up and
voted (prudently counting their chips before they did so), and descended
again. The man with a sense of humour laughed at these, too, and at the
twenty blackbirds in the Senate,--but not so heartily. He laughed at
their gravity, for no gravity can equal that of gentlemen who play with
stacked cards.

The risible gentleman laughed at the proposed legislation, about which
he made the song, and he likened it to a stream that rises hopefully in
the mountains, and takes its way singing at the prospect of reaching
the ocean, but presently flows into a hole in the ground to fill the
forgotten caverns of the earth, and is lost to the knowledge and sight
of man. The caverns he labelled respectively Appropriations, Railroad,
Judiciary, and their guardians were unmistakably the Honourables Messrs.
Bascom, Botcher, and Ridout. The greatest cavern of all he called "The
Senate."

If you listen, you can hear the music of the stream of bills as it is
rising hopefully and flowing now: "Mr. Crewe of Leith gives notice that
on to-morrow or some subsequent day he will introduce a bill entitled,
'An act for the Improvement of the State Highways.' Mr. Crewe of Leith
gives notice, etc. 'An act for the Improvement of the Practice of
Agriculture.' 'An act relating to the State Indebtedness.' 'An act
to increase the State Forest Area.' 'An act to incorporate the State
Economic League.' 'An act to incorporate the State Children's Charities
Association.' 'An act in relation to Abandoned Farms.'" These were some
of the most important, and they were duly introduced on the morrow,
and gravely referred by the Speaker to various committees. As might be
expected, a man whose watchword is, "thorough" immediately got a list
of those committees, and lost no time in hunting up the chairmen and the
various available members thereof.

As a man of spirit, also, Mr. Crewe wrote to Mr. Flint, protesting as
to the manner in which he had been treated concerning committees. In the
course of a week he received a kind but necessa