assured as I walked along the corridor that
my career as a parliamentary reporter had reached an ignominious close.
Near the door of the committee room I encountered old Jack O'Hanlon,
one of the veterans of the gallery and reputed the best classic in all
Westminster. His note-book was tucked in his armpit and he was rubbing
his hands delightedly. "That's parliamentary eloquence, if you like,"
he said as I came up with him; "there's nothing loike that been heard in
the House of Commons these thirty years. There's hardly a scholar in the
classics left in the House." We sat down side by side, and when we had
been at work in silence for a minute or two, the old scholar turned to
me and asked, "Did you happen to catch that phrase of Sam Weller's?" I
gave it to him without difficulty and then an inspiration occurred to
me. The stammering tongue had plundered Father Prout and the prophet
Malachi, Dickens and Ingoldsby, Pope and Smollett and Defoe, and as it
chanced he had made no literary allusion in English which did not recall
some long familiar text to my mind, I offered a bargain. If O'Hanlon
would give me the classical stuff in respect to which I was in
Pagan darkness, I would give him the English with which he was less
well-acquainted. We exchanged notes and between us we turned out an
excellent if a somewhat compressed and truncated report. I felt that I
was saved, and on the following morning, I made an anxious survey of the
work of my rivals. O'Hanlon represented _The Advertiser_, and I
found that the report of a big meeting of the Licensed Victuallers'
Association which had been held somewhere in the provinces had
swamped him. He was cut down to a mere paragraph and as for the other
journals--_The Times, The Telegraph_ and _The Standard_--they were all
hopelessly at sea. There was but one report of that amazing discourse
which was even distantly worthy of it, and that was in _The Daily News_.
I received a special letter of congratulation from Mr J. R. Robinson
who, to the day of his death, persisted in regarding me as a classical
scholar of exceptional acquirements. I never had an opportunity of
undeceiving him or I would certainly have taken it, but I have since
been content to regard this as an example of the haphazard way in which
reputations are sometimes made. I learned, many years after, that I was
still remembered in the gallery as the man who took a note of the most
difficult speech of its year by staring at t