u were going to fire a pistol
in the Commons, you would point it across the House." TIM HEALY just
back from Dublin, where he's been appearing in his favourite character
of pacificator; followed CHAMBERLAIN, and later came SAUNDERSON. But
even he suffered from prevailing tone of dulness, and WILFRID LAWSON,
fast asleep in the corner by Cross Benches, did not miss much.
_Business done._--More talk on Local Government Bill.

_Tuesday._--If anyone looking on at House of Commons at three o'clock
this afternoon had predicted that within an hour it would be teeming
with life, brimming over with human interest, he would have been
looked upon with cold suspicion. NOLAN had taken the floor, and was
understood to be expressing his deliberate opinion on merits of Irish
Local Government Bill. He was certainly saying something, but what it
might be no man could tell. LYON PLAYFAIR, who is up in all kinds of
statistics, tells me 120 words per minute is the average utterance
of articulate speech. NOLAN was doing his 300, and sometimes exceeded
that rate. Not a comma in a column of it. A humming-top on the subject
would have been precisely as instructive and convincing. Some twenty
Members sat there fascinated by the performance. It was not delivered
in a monotone, in which case one could have slept. NOLAN was evidently
arguing in incisive manner, shirking no obstacle, avoiding no point
in the Bill, or any hit made by previous speaker. His voice rose and
fell with convincing modulation. He seemed to be always dropping into
an aside, which led him into another, that opened a sort of Clapham
Junction of converging points. One after the other, the Colonel, with
full steam up, ran along; when he reached terminus of siding, racing
back at sixty miles an hour; and so up and down another. Only guessed
this from modulation of his voice and the intelligent nodding of the
head with which he compelled the attention of ATTORNEY-GENERAL for
IRELAND. For just over half an hour he kept up this pace, and, saving
a trot for the avenue, fell back into his seat gasping for breath,
having concluded a sentence nine hundred words long worked off in
three minutes by the astonished clock.

[Illustration: THE GLADSTONIAN BAGMAN.

["I regard myself as a commercial traveller."--_Speech by Sir William
Harcourt at Bristol, May_ 11, 1892.]]

[Illustration: "T.W."]

An interval of T.W. RUSSELL, with one of his adroitly-argued,
lucidly-arranged speeches. Then M