They wasted, according to Ellis, three-quarters of an hour over beer and chocolate, and wouldn’t have come to order again at all, if he hadn’t begged them separately to do so as a personal favour to him. Then they consumed almost as long again in interrupting the reading of the minutes, to criticise gravely Ellis’s versification, to discuss his “conception of life,” as based on his doggerel lines, and to call attention, wherever poor Ellis had indulged in anything that bordered on “fine” writing, to what Tommy referred to as, “Those subtle obscenities the author has sought, with ghoulish depravity, to disguise in the bombastic periods of a Milton or an Alfred Austin.” They moved that Ellis be “expelled from the aristocracy of intellect, and sent to the Annex, there to be kissed in the face until dead,” and refused to allow the meeting to proceed until the motion had been put and lost by a unanimous vote. Baxford created an inexpensive diversion by throwing a pack of cards into the air, turning up his coat-collar, and exclaiming, as they fell on his head:-- “B-r-r-r-r, how the storm rages without! Think, lads, of the poor sailors on such a night!” Dawson set fire to the portières, because, as he explained, Ellis had said something in his poem about a “lurid glare,” and he wanted to see what they were like. The conflagration was put out with beer, and Ellis was fined three dollars for “perverting youth.” McGaw enjoyed the noise and fooling as much as any one. He didn’t quite know how to stir up that sort of thing himself; but he was no more anxious than the rest to get to the serious business of the meeting. It was late when they finally began to nominate the Third Seven. There were in all sixteen names proposed. An informal vote was taken on them,--“a sort of preliminary canter,” as Haviland said, “just to find out what the general feeling was.” The ballots were playing-cards, cast in Ellis’s hat (when, later in the evening, its brim was torn off during a playful discussion, Ellis was fined another dollar for the ensuing delay). Baxford’s room-mate, Anderson, was the first man voted on. “Although he isn’t just the sort of a man who would be chosen for the first two sevens,” said Baxford, in his little speech just before the hat was passed around, “he’s really a perfect corker. He doesn’t ‘do’ anything in particular; but I’ve known him a long time, and he’s the most amusing sort of a chap, when he wants to be; and--and I think he’d be a mighty good sort of a man to have on.” Of the fourteen votes cast for Anderson, thirteen of them were black. “As an indication of feeling,” remarked Tommy, “the informal ballot is easily a success.”