Steps were audible in the hall, and
every one turned to watch the door, where the distinguished pair now made
their appearance in a hush of expectation over which the beating of the
fans alone prevailed. The Hon. Kedge Halloway was one of the gleaners of
the flesh-pots, himself, and he marched into the room unostentatiously
mopping his shining expanse of brow with a figured handkerchief. He was a
person of solemn appearance; a fat gold watch-chain which curved across
his ponderous front, adding mysteriously to his gravity. At his side
strolled a very tall, thin, rather stooping--though broad-shouldered--
rather shabby young man with a sallow, melancholy face and deep-set eyes
that looked tired. When they were seated, the orator looked over his
audience slowly and with an incomparable calm; then, as is always done, he
and the melancholy young man exchanged whispers for a few moments. After
this there was a pause, at the end of which the latter rose and announced
that it was his pleasure and his privilege to introduce, that evening, a
gentleman who needed no introduction to that assemblage. What citizen of
Carlow needed an introduction, asked the speaker, to the orator they had
applauded in the campaigns of the last twenty years, the statesman author
of the Halloway Bill, the most honored citizen of the neighboring and
flourishing county and city of Amo? And, the speaker would say, that if
there were one thing the citizens of Carlow could be held to envy the
citizens of Amo, it was the Honorable Kedge Halloway, the thinker, to
whose widely-known paper they were about to have the pleasure and
improvement of listening.
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