Julian had gone more than once out of a boyish curiosity to hear the wrangle of the parties in the Chamber. Sitting up in the gallery, and leaning his arms horizontally on the top of the brass railing, he had looked down on the long tables covered with red baize, whereon reposed, startlingly white, a square sheet of paper before the seat of each deputy, and a pencil, carefully sharpened, alongside. He had seen the deputies assemble, correctly frock-coated, punctiliously shaking hands with one another, although they had probably spent the morning in one another's company at the club--the club was the natural meeting-place of the Greeks and the diplomats, while the foreigners, a doubtful lot, congregated either in the gambling-rooms or in the _jardin anglais_ of the casino. He had watched them taking their places with a good deal of coughing, throat-clearing, and a certain amount of expectoration. He had seen the Premier come in amid a general hushing of voices, and take his seat in the magisterial arm-chair in the centre of the room, behind an enormous ink-pot, pulling up the knees of his trousers and smoothing his beard away from his rosy lips with the tips of his fingers as he did so. Julian's attention had strayed from the formalities attendant upon the opening of the session, and his eyes had wandered to the pictures hanging on the walls: Aristidi Patros, the first Premier, after the secession from Greece, b. 1760, d. 1831, Premier of the Republic of Herakleion from 1826 to 1830; Pericli Anghelis, general, 1774-1847; Constantine Stavridis, Premier from 1830 to 1835, and again from 1841 to 1846, when he died assassinated. The portraits of the other Premiers hung immediately below the gallery where Julian could not see them. At the end of the room, above the doors, hung a long and ambitious painting executed in 1840 and impregnated with the romanticism of that age, representing the Declaration of Independence in the _platia_ of Herakleion on the 16th September--kept as an ever memorable and turbulent anniversary--1826. The Premier, Patros, occupied the foreground, declaiming from a scroll of parchment, and portrayed as a frock-coated young man of godlike beauty; behind him stood serried ranks of deputies, and in the left-hand corner a group of peasants, like an operatic chorus, tossed flowers from baskets on to the ground at his feet. The heads of women clustered at the windows of the familiar houses of the _platia_, beneath the fluttering flags with the colours of the new Republic, orange and green. Julian always thought that a portrait of his grandfather, for twelve months President of the collective archipelago of Hagios Zacharie, should have been included among the notables.