The Secretary of Legation kindly got me a ticket to the gallery of the House of Parliament. It seemed extraordinary good luck, for whom else should I hear speak, that very afternoon, but John Bright, Mr. Gladstone and the future Lord Disraeli. I looked for oratory in Mr. Gladstone and saw none, either of voice, manner or word. The subject possibly required none. It was the Scotch Education Bill. The tall, grave, spare-looking man stood there with papers in his hand, talking in the most commonplace manner. Often he turned to some colleague and looked and waited as if expecting an explanation. At last he sat down suddenly, as if he had got up out of time. Mr. Disraeli had been sitting there, writing something on the top of his hat, which he had just taken off for the purpose. There seemed to be no desks. When I first noticed numbers of the members with their hats on, I wondered if the session had begun. What I noticed about Mr. Disraeli was the long legs he stretched out before him, the dark, intellectual face, the large features, the yellow skin, the long black hair, the Jewish expression. He followed Mr. Gladstone, but in a voice so subdued that I, in the gallery, did not understand a word he said. Burly John Bright, with his noble face and sturdy mien, followed. He looked like the typical Englishman. He spoke to the bill in an earnest voice and loud enough, but said nothing that I remember. A Scotch member then rose in confusion, mumbled a few words, got scared, mixed up, turned red and sat down. And this is English oratory, I meditated, and called to mind the names of Douglas and Webster and Lincoln and Blaine. I suppose I was simply there on the wrong day. _Sunday._--We spent a rainy Sunday in London, walking about the deserted streets. Every blind was down--there was silence everywhere. We seemed the only people alive in great London town. Our melancholy was added to by having, through misunderstanding, missed a train that was to take us to a friend in the country, where a hot dinner and English hospitality had awaited us. _At the Channel._--Up to this time there had been nothing so interesting and romantic to me in English scenery as the big castle above the white cliffs of Dover. There was the high, sloping, green plateau and the grey old Castle a thousand feet above us--below it was the sea--across the Channel, only thirty miles away, lay sunny France. CHAPTER II 1869 IN SWITZERLAND--THE ALPS--EMBARRASSMENT IN NOT KNOWING THE LANGUAGE--CELEBRATED EXILES MEET IN A CERTAIN CAFE-- BRENTANO--WAGNER--KINKEL--SCHERR--KELLER--AND OTHERS.