"One thing that gets me is why no one ever seems to take any notice of us when we have a Council on," remarked the President of the Board of Education with an involuntary plaint in his voice. He was standing on the balcony outside the large front room on Mr Strummery's first floor--a room which boasted the noble proportions of a _salon_, and possibly served as one in Georgian days. Certainly Brandenburg Place did not present a spectacle of fluttering animation at the prospect of seeing the great ones of the land assembling within its bounds. At one end of the thoroughfare a milkman was going from area to area with a prolonged melancholy cry more suggestive of Stoke Poges churchyard than of any other spot on earth; at the opposite end a grocer's errand boy, with basket resourcefully inverted upon his head, had sunk down by the railings to sip the nectar from a few more pages of "Iroquois Ike's Last Hope; or, The Phantom Cow-Puncher's Bride." Midway between the two a cat, in the act of crossing the road, had stopped to twitch a forepaw with that air of imperturbable deliberateness in its movements that no other created thing can ever succeed in attaining. In a house opposite some one was rattling off the exhilarating strains of "Humming Ephraim," but even when a hansom cab and two four-wheelers drove up in quick succession to the Premier's door, no one betrayed curiosity to the extent of looking out of the window. The Minister of Education noted these things as he stood on the balcony, and possibly he felt another phase of the gratitude of men that often left Mr Wordsworth mourning. "I can remember the time when crowds used to wait hours in the rain along Downing Street--our people, too--to catch a sight of Estair or Nettlebury. I won't exactly say that it annoys me, because I've seen too much of the hollowness of things for that, but it certainly is rummy why it should be so." "A very good thing, too," commented the Premier briskly from the room. "I don't know that we could have a greater compliment. The people know that we are plain, straightforward men like themselves, and they know that we are doing our work without having to come and see us at it. They don't regard us almost as little deities--interesting to see, but quite different and above themselves. That's why." Every one in the room said "Hear! Hear!" as though that exactly defined his own sentiments; and every one in the room looked rather sad, as though at the back of their collective minds there lurked a doubt whether it might not be more pleasant to be regarded almost as little deities. "You needn't go as far back as Estair and Nettlebury," put in Vossit of the Treasury. "See how they fairly 'um round Hampden whenever he's about." "Not us," interposed another man emphatically. "Let them go on their own messin' way; it'll do us no harm. You never saw a working man at any of their high and mighty meetings."