Leacraft and Thomsen watched with fascinated eyes the broad terrace of the Victoria Embankment, illuminated with the moon’s effulgence, whose unchecked glory met a feeble rivalry in a few sickly gas mantels, and a solitary electric lamp. The noble houses of legislation--and to the eyes of Leacraft they never seemed more imbued with a supremely delicate and elevating beauty--rose from the water’s edge, like some creation of an inspired dreamer, woven of splintered rays of light, with pencilled lines of ebony filched from the darkest night. It embodied a loveliness past even the powers of thought to measure or describe. The houses flamed with light, and the strong light on the clock tower, announced the sitting of Parliament, sent back to the moon a terrestrial radiance, that resembled the pulsations of a fallen star. As they passed the Westminster Bridge, their eyes caught the distant lights of Lambeth Palace. Both knew that to-night the King dined with the Archbishop. Slowly their boat drew near the landing, and the two men who guided it motioned to its occupants to get ready to disembark, as the landing was deprived of its usual outfit, owing to the clogging cakes of ice which clung to the wall. The heavy nose of the boat was pushed into the wall, and Leacraft and Thomsen scrambled up the steps, and gained the walk which led to the Victoria Arch, and the entrance of the Parliament House. Here a jam was encountered, and the news was soon learned that Balfour had begun his speech an hour before the announced time, and was now engaged in the closing appeal on the motion before the house. And what was this motion? To explain it, it is necessary to rehearse some of the preceding events, which had finally eventuated in this most marvellous situation; a debate in the House of Parliament as to whether the English people should evacuate England. This momentous and world-moving spectacle was now actually contemplated by the fixed attention of every nation on the earth. Its awful solemnity, the convulsing pathos of it, the immense commercial dislocation it involved, its social agony, the calamitous doubts it summoned as to the stability of Europe itself, and the fiercer sudden question of the meaning of human existence on this planet, it aroused, made the debate of the English Parliament then pending the most extraordinary discussion ever known in human annals. The occasion for it had practically been forced or precipitated by the coercive power of scientific opinion. And the curious thing about this same scientific opinion was that it first resisted the overwhelming proof of the subsidence of the isthmus and the elevation of the Caribbean wall of transgression, and then fervently accepted it, with not one scintilla more of demonstration, and in accepting it proposed for itself the unwelcome task of convincing the English people that they should evacuate their country.