In looking up Young Sir Henry Vane, it seemed fitting to have some knowledge of Parliament, and I welcomed the chance when, on the 19th of August, 1886, Parliament convened. It was a time of agitation. At the election just previous the Liberals, with Gladstone at the head of the Cabinet, had undergone defeat and the Conservatives had come in with Lord Randolph Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The first night was sure to be full of turmoil and excitement. Through Mr. Bryce's good offices I had a seat in the Strangers' Gallery. The student of history must always tread the precincts of Westminster with awe. There attached to the Abbey is the Chapter House. The central column divides overhead into the groins that form the arched ceiling, the stones at its base still bearing a stain from the rubbing elbows of mediaeval legislators, the floor worn by their hurrying feet, for from the time of Edward I. the Chapter House remained for centuries the legislative meeting-place. The old St. Stephen's Chapel to which Parliament at length removed was burned some eighty years since, but Westminster Hall, its attachment--the great hall of William Rufus, escaped and the new buildings of Parliament stand on the site of its former home. The present House of Commons occupies the ground of the old Chapel and in size and arrangement differs little from it. The Hall is small. The seven hundred members seated on the benches which slope up from the centre, crowd the floor space, while the galleries for the press at one end, for strangers at the other, and for the use of the Lords and the Diplomatic corps at the sides give only meagre accommodation. I passed into the building at nightfall, getting soul-stirring glimpses into the great area of Westminster Hall, in which burned only one far-away light. Its grandeur was more impressive in the dimness than in the glare. The lofty associations of the spot, coronations of kings, the reverberations of eloquence, the illustrious victims that had gone out from its tribunal to the scaffold thronged in my thought as I momentarily paused. But time pressed and I passed on to the central Hall where I stood in a jostling crowd, absorbed in the present with little thought of the fine frescoes that lined the walls or of the history that had been made in that environment. I was to send in my card to Mr. Bryce and while I stood puzzled as to what course to take, a good friend came to my side in the person of Sir Henry Norman. He had not then received his knightly title but was simply assistant to W.T. Stead on the _Pall Mall Gazette_, pushing his way, but already marked for a distinguished and eccentric career. He came to America as a youth and entered the Harvard Theological School. Inverting his pyramid, after beginning with the cone, he put in the base, taking up the work of undergraduate, and studying for an A.B. At Harvard he is best remembered as Creon in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, where his handsome face and figure and