His mind was like a cage-full of monkeys, all intent on some delirious and unintelligible business. “Show me a man with a green nose,” he once passionately exclaimed, “and I’ll believe in ghosts.” He had a voice as curious as his boots, in range a tenor, in quality like the beating of a wooden hammer on cracked metal plates, and every week he held a glee-singing meeting after Hall in his rooms, and refreshed his choir with Tintara wine, hot tea-cakes, and Borneo cigars. We sang catches and rounds and madrigals, he beating time with a paper-knife, which, as he got shriller and more excited, would slip from his hand and fly with prodigious velocity across the room. He always took the part of first tenor, and whoever gave the key on the piano put it up a tone or two, in order to hear Nixon bark and yelp at some preposterous C. If it was obviously out of range he would say (running all his words into each other like impressions on blotting paper): “SurelythatsratherhighisthatonlyA?”... Then the unaccountable mistake was discovered and we started again. Where he found all these rounds and catches I cannot conjecture: much music, certainly, that I have heard in Nixon’s room has never reached my ears again, nor have I ever seen anyone, except those who attended these meetings, who was acquainted with the following catch. It started _Lento_, and, under the strokes of the paper-knife quickened up to _andante_ and _allegro_, and ended _prestissimo possibile_. The words ran thus, starting with a first tenor lead: Mr. Speaker, though ’tis late, I must lengthen the debate, The debate. Pray support the chair! Pray support the chair! Mr. Speaker, though ’tis late, I must lengthen the debate. Question! question! Order! order! Hear him! Hear him! Hear him! Hear! (_Da capo: da capo: da capo._) Every moment it got quicker, the barks and yells over “Order! Order!” grew louder and louder, until the whole kennel was a yelp, and when everyone was quite exhausted, and the pandemonium no longer tolerable, Nixon brought down the paper-knife (if it had not flown out of his hand) with a loud bang on the table and wiped his face and laughed for pleasure. Then he poured out Tintara wine, and gave us Borneo cigars, while he tumbled an avalanche of music out of a bookcase and tried to find “I loved thee beautiful and kind.” Apart from glee-singing, lawn-tennis and Latin prose, his mind chiefly ran on argument and on what he called “starting a hare.” He would advance some amazing [Illustration: “HER GRACE” (A DOMESTIC CARICATURE) [Page 219]