Then, too, there was a Document Room where the bills and resolutions were kept when printed. Also, about each of the five doors of House and Senate, when those sacred gatherings were in session, there were situated a host of messengers, carried for twelve hundred dollars a year each on the Doorkeeper’s rolls. It was the duty and pleasure of these myrmidons to bring forth members into the corridors, to the end that they be refreshed with a word of counsel from constituents who had traveled thither for that purpose; and in the finish to lend said constituents money to return home. Jim Britt, following these first connings of the directory, went personally to the capitol, and from the galleries, leaning his chin on the rail the while, gazed earnestly on greatness about the transaction of its fame. These studies and personally conducted tours, and those conversations to be their incident which came off between Jim Britt and chance-blown folk who fell across his pathway, enlarged Jim Britt’s store of information in sundry fashions. He discovered that full ten thousand bills and resolutions were introduced each Congress; that by virtue of a mere narrowness of time not more than five per cent, of this storm of business could be dealt with, the other ninety-five, whether for good or ill, being starved to death for lack of occasion. The days themselves were no longer than five working hours since Congress convened at noon. The great radical difference between House and Senate loomed upon Jim Britt in a contrast of powers which abode with the presiding officers of those mills to grind new laws. The president of the Senate owned few or none. He might enforce Jefferson’s rules for debates and call a recalcitrant senator to order, a call to which the recalcitrant paid little heed beyond tart remarks on his part concerning his own high determinations to yield to no gavel tyranny, coupled with a forceful though conceited assurance flung to the Senate at large, that he, the recalcitrant, knew his rights (which he never did), and would uphold them (which he never failed to do.) The Senate president named no committees; owned no control over the order of business; indeed he was limited to a vote on ties, a warning that he would clear the galleries (which was never done) when the public therein roosting, applauded, and the right to prevent two senators from talking at one and the same time. These marked the utmost measure of his influence. Any senator could get the floor for any purpose, and talk on any subject from Prester John to Sheep in the Seventeenth Century, while his strength stood. Also, and much as dogs have kennels permitted them for their habitation, the presiding officer of the Senate--in other words, the Vice-President of the nation--was given a room, separate and secluded to himself, into which he might creep when chagrin for his own unimportance should overmaster him or otherwise his woes become greater than he might publicly bear.