The House of Commons framing its Rules of Procedure, and anxious above all things to provide even overlapping opportunities for speech-making, supplies a final illimitable opportunity on the Appropriation Bill. This is brought in at the close of a Session, and upon its second reading members may discuss any subject under the sun. Any speech a member may have prepared at an earlier period of the Session, upon any subject whatsoever, may, failing the first legitimate opportunity, be worked off on the Appropriation Bill. This measure plays the part of the seven baskets in the parable. All the elocutionary or disputatious fragments that remain after the feast of the Session are picked up and crammed within its ample folds. That is bad enough. But since discovery was made of potentialities of debate on the Address, that occasion has been utilized in analogous fashion. Now we have an Appropriation Bill debate at the beginning of the Session, with pleasing prospect of another at its close. [Sidenote: INNOVATION.] The present Session will be memorable in the long record, since it witnessed an innovation that is probably the beginning of the end of an absurd custom. From time immemorial it has been ordained that members moving and seconding the Address in reply to the Speech from the Throne shall array themselves in uniform if they have the right to wear it. Failing that, they must strut in the velvet and ruffles of Court dress. This Session Mr. Fenwick was selected to second the Address. The member for the Wansbeck Division of Northumberland is one of the most highly esteemed members of the House of Commons, a man of modest mien and great capacity, an excellent speaker, who has the priceless gift of conveying to an audience conviction that he knows what he is talking about and means what he says. [Illustration: MOVER AND SECONDER.] Mr. Fenwick, as he has proudly recorded in the pages of "Dod," began his career as a working collier, and when, in 1885, elected to a seat in the House of Commons, he threw down his pick in the Bebside Colliery as a preliminary to having a good wash, changing his clothes, and going up to Westminster. Court dress is, of course, not common at Bebside, neither is the crimson and gold lace of the dauntless Colonel of Militia, or the epaulettes and tightly-buttoned frock-coat of the Rear-Admiral. If Mr. Fenwick had been inclined to act up to the spirit of the ordinance, he might have appeared in his old collier's garb. With pick and spade under his arm, and lantern in his hand, he would have made a picturesque figure. That, however, did not seem to occur to him, and he had the good sense to break through the tradition by appearing in his ordinary Sunday go-to-meeting clothes, leaving his colleague who moved the Address to dazzle the House with sight of the uniform of the 4th Oxfordshire Light Infantry. [Sidenote: THE HORSE GUARDS' GATE.]