to take note of the presence of its representatives. In 1867, a Committee sat to consider the general arrangements of the House. The reporters, greatly daring, took the opportunity of laying before it a statement of their grievances, and asked for fuller convenience for carrying on their work. Lord Charles Russell, then Serjeant-at-Arms, was, very properly, astonished at their unreasonableness, and plaintively deplored the times when, as he put it, reporters seemed to require only the necessaries of life, not presuming to lift their eyes to its luxuries.
"They used, I am told," Lord Charles added, "to have just a glass of water and biscuits, or anything of that sort. Now they have their tea at the back of the gallery."
Mr. David Plunket.
Oliver Twist asking for more scarcely reached the height of the audacity of these reporters in 1867. Like Mr. Bumble, the Serjeant-at-Arms of the day literally gasped in dismayed astonishment.
All this is changed. Thanks to the courtesy and reasonableness of successive First Commissioners of Works, of whom Mr. David Plunket was not the least forward in doing good, the arrangements in connection with the Press Gallery of to-day leave nothing to be desired.
Of the changes that have taken place in the House itself, and of the ghosts that flit about the benches where twenty years ago they sat in flesh and bone, I shall have something to say next month.
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