inscribed on the ornamental
signboard above us, and 'Instituted 1756' on another signboard near.
Dingy portraits of departed Grands and Deputies decorate the walls.
Punctually at nine My Grand opens the proceedings amid profound silence.
The deputy buries himself in his newspaper, and maintains as profound a
calm as the Speaker 'in another place.' The most perfect order is
preserved. The Speaker or deputy, who seems to know all about it, rolls
silently in his chair: he is a fat dark man, with a small and rather
sleepy eye, such as I have seen come to the surface and wink lazily at
the fashionable people clustered round a certain tank in the Zoological
Gardens. He re-folds his newspaper from time to time until deep in the
advertisements. The waiters silently remove empty tumblers and tankards,
and replace them full. But My Grand commands profound attention from the
room, and a neighbour, who afterwards proved a perfect Boanerges in
debate, whispered to us concerning his vast attainments and high
literary position.

"This chieftain of the Thoughtful Men is, we learn, the leading
contributor to a newspaper of large circulation, and, under his
signature of 'Locksley Hall,' rouses the sons of toil to a sense of the
dignity and rights of labour, and exposes the profligacy and corruption
of the rich to the extent of a column and a quarter every week. A
shrewd, hard-headed man of business, with a perfect knowledge of what he
had to do, and with a humorous twinkle of the eye, My Grand went
steadily through his work, and gave the Thoughtful Men his epitome of
the week's intelligence. It seemed clear that the Cogers had either not
read the newspapers, or liked to be told what they already knew. They
listened with every token of interest to facts which had been published
for days, and it seemed difficult to understand how a debate could be
carried on when the text admitted so little dispute. But we sadly
underrated the capacity of the orators near us. The sound of My Grand's
last sentence had not died out when a fresh-coloured, rather
aristocratic-looking elderly man, whose white hair was carefully combed
and smoothed, and whose appearance and manner suggested a very different
arena to the one he waged battle in now, claimed the attention of the
Thoughtful ones. Addressing 'Mee Grand' in the rich and unctuous tones
which a Scotchman and Englishman might try for in vain, this orator
proceeded, with every profession of respect, to co