They are pleasant rooms in which the Labour member finds the best happiness of his life. They are not large. They are not handsomely furnished, for a Labour member has no need of luxury; but to Mr. Crooks every little adornment in them has its own story to tell and its own pleasant memory. On one of the walls are two oil paintings of ships in distress--"good or bad," says Mr. Crooks, "I'm no judge," But they are valuable to him, because they were painted by a man down on his luck, as a thanksgiving for a good turn done to him by the only friend he had. "Bless you," says Mr. Crooks, "they all bring me little things, and I can't refuse them. See that champagne glass on the piano? That was given me by a poor old lady I used to look after a bit. That wine glass on the other side came from another old friend. Someone will bring me a China shepherd, another a vase or candlestick, or a comic pig. It's pleasant, you know!"... Mr. Crooks is one of the pleasantest and most interesting men to visit. If you take him at the right time--half-past nine o'clock--it means an early journey from the West!--he will sit you down to a plate of porridge and give you more information about the life of the working-classes in the course of an hour than the most laborious reading of Blue-books will do in a lifetime. The visitor must be prepared for interruptions. In a corner of the breakfast-room is a member of the family who likes to have his say. It is a poll-parrot--"as cunning as a barge-load of monkeys," says his owner affectionately. He has a peculiar habit of cracking invisible filbert-nuts at the back of his throat, rather disconcerting to a stranger; and although he dotes on Mr. Crooks, it is a little game of his to snub the Labour member by depreciatory remarks and scornful whistles of derision. But he always has an affectionate "Goo'-bye, Will!" for his master when he puts on his hat in the morning. To Mrs. Crooks he is always courteous. "Goo'-morning, mother!" he says, when the lady comes down to breakfast, and thrusts his beak out for a kiss. Then he calls "Tilly! Tilly!" in a shrill voice, like an elderly landlady, and is not satisfied till Mrs. Crooks's pretty, black-eyed daughter has given him his morning greeting. "He has his little prejudices, like the rest of us," says Mr. Crooks. "He can't abide babies, and squawks at them fearfully." Mr. George R. Sims gave a sketch of "A Morning with Will Crooks" in the _Daily Chronicle_ of May 2nd, 1906. He suggested that if 81, Gough Street--Crooks's Castle, as he called it--had a brass plate on the door, the most appropriate device to be inscribed upon it would be, "Inquire within upon everything."