Members quietly respond, the busy subordinates at the desk note responses, and everybody studies the appearance of the House. There are enough old faces to give it a familiar look, and yet there are strange changes. The Administration side has, in more senses than one, been filled too full. It has spilled over the main aisle till half the Democratic seats are occupied with its surplus, and the forlorn hope, that still flies the banner of the dead party, is crowded into the extreme left. James Brooks, however, smooth, plausible, and good-natured, sturdily keeps his seat by the main isle.[63] Directly in front of him, two or three desks nearer to the vacant Speaker’s chair, (which neither is destined to fill,) sits a medium-sized, handsome man-of-the-world-looking gentleman, with English whiskers and moustache—Henry J. Raymond. “Grim old Thad.,” with wig browner and better curled than ever, occupies his old seat in the center of the Administration side; and directly behind him, greeting his friends with his left hand, which the Rebels left uncrippled, is General Schenck. Toward the extreme right is Governor Boutwell, in his old seat; and beside him is a small but closely-knit and muscular figure, with the same closely-cropped moustache and imperial as of old, the jaunty, barrel-organ-voiced General Banks, ex-Speaker, ex-Governor, etc. Next to him is a bearded, black son of Anak, with a great hole in his forehead, which looks as if a fragment of shell might once have been there—General Bidwell, one of the new members from California. Garfield is in his old place near the Clerk’s desk, and just across the main aisle from him, on what used to be the Democratic side, when there was a Democratic party, is that most nervous and irritable-seeming of all figures, the best-natured and crossest-looking man in the House, John A. Bingham.[64] He has been absent from Congress for a term, has filled arduous posts and won high praises, and comes back, they say, to take high place on the committees. Away across, in the midst of the Democratic desks, rises a head that might be called auburn, if the whiskers were not brick-dust red. It is a brother-in-law of the semi-Rebel Governor Seymour, of New York—one of the ablest Republicans of the House in old times, defeated two years ago, but sent back now, more radical than ever—Roscoe Conkling. If he had been a little better tempered the House, in the Thirty-seventh Congress, would have placed him within the first five in the lists of its most honored and trusted members. Near him, one naturally looks to the desk of the candidate opposed to President Johnson at the late election. Alas! a West Virginia Unionist fills the seat of George H. Pendleton. Back of him is the desk of the little joker of the Ohio delegation. But the little joker played his tricks too often, and has been dismissed to a second-rate claim agency business, while another West Virginian occupies his seat in the House.