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Updated: June 6, 2025
Imagine then, on an afternoon in the middle phase of the strike, some half dozen of the law-makers of a sovereign state, top-hatted and conventionally garbed in black, accustomed to authority, to conferring favours instead of requesting them, climbing the steep stairs and pausing on the threshold of that hall, fingering their watch chains, awaiting recognition by the representatives of the new and bewildering force that had arisen in an historic commonwealth.
Letty was close at her shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage. A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted, was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin little voice singing something or other about somebody or something evidently pathetic.
Short, influenced by his inherent laziness, had succeeded in persuading the Italians that he was a great orator, and that they could not better forward the Cause in their new country than by carrying for him the movable platform from which he delivered his spirited harangues; so that one or two of them were generally present helping to form the nucleus of an audience, and ready to lend their valid support should any drunken loafer or top-hatted bourgeois, outraged in his feelings, attempt to disturb the proceedings.
At first he had mistaken him for a different man each time he had passed. Then the lazy certainty had grown up within him that it was always the same man. A man who wanted something wanted something that was in that house. It wasn't possible to make out his features. He wore a morning-coat and was top-hatted. The swing of his carriage was indefinitely familiar.
Imagine then, on an afternoon in the middle phase of the strike, some half dozen of the law-makers of a sovereign state, top-hatted and conventionally garbed in black, accustomed to authority, to conferring favours instead of requesting them, climbing the steep stairs and pausing on the threshold of that hall, fingering their watch chains, awaiting recognition by the representatives of the new and bewildering force that had arisen in an historic commonwealth.
The Queen was dead, and the air of the greatest city upon earth grey with unshed tears. Fur-coated and top-hatted, with Annette beside him in dark furs, Soames crossed Park Lane on the morning of the funeral procession, to the rails in Hyde Park. Little moved though he ever was by public matters, this event, supremely symbolical, this summing-up of a long rich period, impressed his fancy.
A band was playing vigorously something that sounded like the Star-Spangled Banner, and a group of top-hatted and frock-coated gentlemen were the front figures in a great crowd that covered the station platform.
The top-hatted representative of railway interests approached. Francisco stopped at Robert's office on his way home. Windham had moved into one of the new buildings, with an elevator, on Kearney street. In his private office was a telephone, one of those new instruments for talking over a wire which still excited curiosity, though they were being rapidly installed by the Pacific Bell Company.
"He would have made a rare sensation in Lincoln's Inn if she had," said I; and we both laughed heartily at the imaginary picture of Tahuti Jellicoe, slender-beaked and top-hatted, going about his business in Lincoln's Inn and the Law Courts.
I abandoned hope of unearthing the top-hatted antiquarian and had indeed concluded him to be a myth, when a friend supplied me with what may be absurdly familiar to less bookish people: "The Nooks and By-ways of Italy." By Craufurd Tait Ramage, LL.D. Liverpool, 1868. A glance sufficed to prove that this Ramage belonged to the brotherhood of David Urquhart, Mure of Caldwell, and the rest of them.
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