MRS. RAM says no wonder people are blown out at Christmas, as they do fill themselves with so many "combustibles."
[Illustration: "SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE."
(_A Meeting of the Church of England Temperance Society. The Vote of Thanks to the Chairman_.)
"AND, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, LET ME POINT OUT TO YOU, IN THESE DAYS WHERE THE ACTIVITY OF THE CHURCH IS SO OFTEN CALLED INTO QUESTION, THAT OUR REVERED DIOCESAN COULD NEVER BE CALLED AN '_ORNAMENTAL BISHOP'_!"]
(_Passages from a Political "Christmas Carol" of the Period descriptive of a slumbering Stateman's Yule-Tide Dream._)
Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously sonorous snore, and sitting up on what seemed to be a nightmare-like blend of the Treasury Bench and his own bed, to get his thoughts together, SADSTONE (like _Scrooge_) had no occasion to be told that Big Ben was again upon the stroke of Twelve.
Now, being prepared for almost anything--from J-SS-E C-LL-NGS to a Vote of Censure--he was not by any means prepared for Nothing! Consequently, when the bell boomed its twelfth stroke, and nothing appeared, or happened--not even a nightmare in the shape of T-MMY B-WL-S, or a Motion for Adjournment--he was taken with a fit of the shivers.
At last he began to think that the source and centre of the ghostly light which seemed to gleam on him from nowhere in particular, might be in the adjoining room, his own private Downing Street _sanctum_. Thence indeed, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea taking full possession of his mind, he got up softly, and shuffled in his slippers to the door.
The moment SADSTONE'S hand was on the lock, a strange voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He obeyed.
It was his own room. There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with shamrock green and shillelagh branches that it looked a perfect Grove of Blarney. A lurid blaze, like a blue-tongued snapdragon flare, went hissing up the chimney, revealing in weird glimpses on the heated hearth and chimney tiles spectral figures of impish design and menacing gesture. Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were Blue Books, abortive Bills, scrolls on which were inscribed endless questions and unnumbered amendments; bundles of party papers and political pamphlets; pallid sucking-pigs that seemed to demand rather opportune interment than human digestion; long wreaths of sausage-like shackles; resurrection pies of indigestible crust and full of offal scraps and tainted "block ornaments"; pudding-shaped bombs; barrels of explosives and fulminants; red hot (political) "chestnuts" of the most hackneyed partisan sort; Dead-Sea apples of the dustiest kind, savouring of sand and strife; fiery looking Ulster oranges; belated (parliamentary) pairs, and seething bowls of raw and vitriolic party spirit, that made the chamber dim, dank, and malodorous with their heady steam. In uneasy state upon this extraordinary conglomerate couch or throne, there sat an ogreish giant of pantomimic size and bogeyishly menacing expression, portentous to see; who bore a smokily-flaring torch, in shape not unlike an Anarch's beacon or Fury's bale-fire, and held it up, high up, to shed its lurid light on SADSTONE, as he came peeping round the door.