One morning, in early spring, the galleries of the House of Representatives were thronged to suffocation, long before the mallet of the Speaker called the members to _Order_, by a quasi “_lucus a non lucendo_” process! Time never seemed to lag so tardily, as did the hands of the clock, opposite R. M. T. Hunter’s chair—it appeared as if they would never point zenith-ward to the hour of high noon! Had it been the last night of a session when those hands have a prescriptive right to “hasten slowly” to the witching church-yard hour, lest in the hurry of the closing scene, something might be omitted, which the law makers had no time to think of during the seven or eight preceding months—had it been the close of a session, we affirm that those “tardy paced hands” would have acquitted themselves to admiration—but now, never did Juliet when she had “bought the mansion of a love but not possess’d it” wish the “fiery footed steeds” to “gallop apace” with more intensity of expectation, than did the attending crowd long for the hour of twelve. At last it came—the humdrum voice of an assistant clerk was heard reading “yesterday’s minutes” as monotonously as the sounds of a “woodpecker tapping the hollow beech tree!” When Corwin of Ohio rose and moved that the further reading of the minutes be dispensed with, bright eyes in the gallery voted him thanks, and when the “morning hour” was over and the Speaker called the “orders of the day”—then, “mute expectation spread its anxious hush” over the entire auditory! “When the House adjourned with this bill under consideration, the gentleman from Pennsylvania was entitled to the floor,” said the Speaker. And Henry Stanton rose to the question. He who but a few years before had “no jointure but a green vegetable stall in the market” to offer the rich and proud Amy Laverty in exchange for her love! Calm, dignified and self possessed he rose, though a thousand eyes were bent fixedly upon him. This was the calmness of confident mastery of his subject—the dignity of conscious intellectual greatness. Slowly, emphatically and unostentatiously he pronounced his exordium—then with consummate skill, he combatted all the arguments of his opponents and fortified his own position. Warmed with his subject “rapt, inspired,” he commenced his peroration. Brilliant as the lightning flash; glowing as the lava flow; bold, dashing, impetuous as the mighty mountain torrent was the character of his eloquence! Scarcely could the listening crowd restrain themselves from open applause and many rising indications of an almost irrepressible movement, were silenced by the Speaker’s hammer.