Page:Artabanzanus (Ferrar, 1896).djvu/228

220 on the shores of the Great Lake. 'And who,' shouted one impassioned orator—I think he was the member for a famous rotten borough called Lickdust—'and who, what monarch upon the aqueous and adamantine globe, be he or she whom he or she may, shall be so great, so rich, so magnificent, so exquisitely beautiful, and so enormously powerful as the Princess, the Queen, the Empress of that enchanting city, our lovely and voluptuous Bellagranda?'

This complimentary outburst was received with the wildest enthusiasm, and fairly brought down and brought up the House. Every member was instantly on his legs. Five hundred throats yelled, and roared, and cheered with delight: a thousand dusky paws waved frantically in the air. Five hundred tails flourished triumphantly round as many horned heads. The fair object of all this adulation, whatever her inward emotions might have been, took but little notice of it. She did not rise from her throne, but merely inclined her head slightly, and turning round, cast on me a stealthy look of triumph, as if she would say: 'What think you of this?'

When order was restored, several members gave notice that they intended to bring in the Bills which each one had in charge, and lay them on the table of this House. The titles, or objects of some of them I distinctly remember. Extraordinary as it may appear, they all had reference, more or less, to our own pretty island of Tasmania, and embraced many wild and chimerical schemes. To avoid prolixity, I shall only acquaint my readers with two of them. The first was for borrowing fifty millions of pounds sterling to enable men and women to burrow, like rabbits, under the earth, especially of Tasmania, and hide themselves from persecutors and slanderers whenever they pleased; and the other, less ambitious but more outrageous, to borrow