"A puir creature!" he said, one night, staring straight up at the gaslit roof. There was no one up there at the moment, and as this happened to be the night when WEIR had eleven questions on the paper, by way of showing his want of confidence in the Government, and was approaching the ninth with ever deepening chest notes, there is too much reason to fear that at that moment the Member for Inverness-shire was not unconscious of the existence of the Member for Ross and Cromarty.
JAMES GALLOWAY'S boot-issuing and blood-curdling tones; his tragic reiteration of the phrase, "Is the right hon. gentleman a Weir?" The solemn sweep of his arm as he places the reluctant _pince-nez_ on his disputatious nose; his stare of haughty surprise when Lowlanders opposite titter at his inquiry about the lost handle of the parish pump in outraged Pitlochrie; his habit of turning up at unexpected places on either side of the House below the Gangway--these things are unique in their way. In the aggregate they would, save for THE MACGREGOR, have placed him on an unapproachable pinnacle. After to-night he will reign alone. The other King of the Bedlam Brentford has abdicated. But evermore there will rest over JAMES GALLOWAY the chill shadow of the mighty triumph with which his rival closed his public career.
Nothing in the parliamentary life of THE MACGREGOR became him so well as its quittance. The artful way in which he led the SQUIRE OF MALWOOD up to confession of intent with respect to the Crofters Bill; the SQUIRE'S humble plea to wait till Thursday; the MACGREGOR'S stern response, "That is not good enough for me;" then his swinging march down the Gangway (almost you could hear the pibroch playing); his halt before the Mace; his stately bow to the SPEAKER; the march resumed; the fresh halt at the Bar; another sweeping obeisance (again fancy feigned the faint sound of the distant pibroch), and the MACGREGOR was o'er the border, and awa'.
"A puir daft body," said JAMES GALLOWAY WEIR, his musing sight, by strange coincidence, also fixed on the ceiling.
_Business done._--THE MACGREGOR shakes the dust of the House of Commons from off his feet. In disordered state of things that followed, paralysed Government escaped defeat in Committee on Welsh Disestablishment Bill by narrow majority of nine.