looking better, and would be all right again after the recess.
He was never seen in the House of Commons again, though this was not his last appearance in public. The final journeying forth of the pitcher, the occasion when it, doubtless, received the final fracture, was on Monday, July 13th, 1890. The Shah was on a visit to London, and this day was fixed for a reception at Hatfield. All the world were bidden to the festivities, which culminated in a great luncheon party on the Monday. Mr. Smith was one of the house party, arriving on the Saturday. He would have been much better in his bed, but the occasion was important, and if he could only crawl along the path of duty, he would go. One of his fellow guests, a colleague in the Cabinet, tells me of his appearance at the dinner on Sunday night. As he sat at the table he was evidently in acute pain.
"We could see death written on his face," said his colleague.
But he talked and smiled and made-believe that nothing was the matter. He was induced to withdraw as soon as the ladies left the dining-room. So acute was his agony, his ancient trouble having developed in an attack of gout in the stomach, that he could not go to bed, passing a sleepless night in a chair. But there was the luncheon next day, with the big company down from London, a fresh call of duty which he obeyed. He sat through the meal, and gallantly went home to die.
The end came at Walmer, after three months' additional suffering, borne with unfailing courage and patience. He was always sanguine that on the morrow he would be able to go out for a cruise in his beloved Pandora, lying at anchor just off the battlements of the castle waiting for the Master. It seemed quite a natural and appropriate thing that on the very day the newspapers contained the announcement of his death, news came of the tragic end of Mr. Parnell, and as newspaper space is strictly limited, and the British public can give their minds to only one excitement at a time, there was hardly room to do justice to the quietly noble life just closed at Walmer.
PETITIONS. Colonel Kenyon is not, except by chance, and unconsciously, a humorist. But there was one day in the Session when he flashed upon the pleased House a gleam of genuine humour. Being charged with the presentation of a number of petitions against the Welsh Suspensory Bill, he borrowed from the Library a huge waste-paper basket, stuffed the bundles of circulars therein, and, marching round the table in full view of a crowded House, deposited them in the sack which hangs at the corner of the table by the Clerk's seat.
"Premature."
This was premature, and, in the circumstances, sardonic. Colonel Kenyon being in charge of the petitions, might, but for the unaccustomed temptation of humour, have let them go along the ordinary course to oblivion. All petitions presented to the House of Commons are predestined for the waste-paper basket. Colonel Kenyon, with a promptitude learned in tented fields on which forty centuries looked down, scorned circumlocutory habits, and put the petitions in the waste-paper basket to begin with.
The right of petitioning the House of Commons is ancient, and at one time may have had some significance, even importance. It must have been prior to the time of Dr. Johnson, that shrewd observer having in the hearing of Mr. Boswell gone to the root of the matter.
"This petitioning," he genially observed, when the subject cropped up in conversation, "is a new mode of distressing Government, and a mighty easy one. I will undertake to get petitions either against quarter-guineas or half-guineas with the help of a little hot wine."
At this fin-de-siècle, whilst a stable Government is in no wise distressed by a shower of petitions, the process of bringing them to bear on the House of Commons remains a mighty easy one, in some cases not
