I looked at Lord Mafferton, who certainly had not removed his hat--the large, round, shiny silk hat worn by every gentleman in England, and every commercial traveller in America. Under the hat he was very pink and fat, with rather a snubby nose, and little twinkling blue eyes, and a suggestion of white whisker about the place where his chin and his cheek disappeared into his neck. He wore lavender-kid gloves, and was inclined to corpulency. I should not have trusted this description of a peer of your realm if it had come from any other American pen than my own--I should have set it down as a gross exaggeration, due to envy, from the fact that we can neither produce peers in our own country nor keep them there for any length of time; but I was obliged to believe my own eyes, and that is the way they reported Lord Mafferton from the other side of your Upper House. There were other gentlemen in the rows opposite--gentlemen all in black, and gentlemen in light waistcoats, bearded and clean-shaven, most of them elderly, but a few surprisingly middle-aged--for your natural expectation is to see a peer venerable--but I must say there was not one that I would have picked out to be a peer, for any particular reason, in the street. And it seemed to me that, since they are constitutional, as it were, there ought to be some way of knowing them. I reasoned again, however, that perhaps my lack of discrimination was due to my not being accustomed to seeing peers--that possibly the delicate distinctions and values that make up a peer would be perfectly evident to a person born, so to speak, under the shadow of the aristocracy. And in the meantime the proceedings began by everybody standing up. I don't know whether I actually expected a procession and a band, but when I discovered that we were all standing while four or five gentlemen in red gowns walked to the other end of the room and took chairs, my emotions were those of blank surprise. Presently I felt Lady Torquilin give an emphatic tug to my skirt. 'Sit down, child!' she said. 'Everybody else has! Do you want to make a speech?'--and I sat down quickly. Then I observed that a gentleman in black, also in fancy dress, was reading something indistinctly to the four or five red-gowned gentlemen, who looked very solemn and stately, but said nothing. It was so difficult for a stranger to understand, that I did not quite catch what was said to another gentleman in black with buckled shoes, but it must have been to the purport of 'Go and fetch it!' for he suddenly began to walk out backwards, stopping at every few steps to bow with great deference to them of the red gowns, which must have been very trying, for nobody returned the bows, and he never could tell who might have come in behind him. 'I suppose he has gone out for a minute to get something,' I said to Lady Torquilin; and then she told me what, of course, I ought to have known if I had refreshed myself with