Disgruntled

In Tokyo stood a low rambling structure of wood and stucco, in which the Japanese House of Peers and House of Representatives have been cooped and cramped for decades. Last week entered several students where many a statesman has trod.

Neither peers nor representatives, they had come to take the Japanese bar examination. When the papers were passed out to them they became disgruntled at the difficulty of the questions, and they are said to have bethought themselves of a way out of their difficulties as practicable as it was breathtaking. Having handed in their papers, it is alleged that they set fire to the building before examiners could grade them.

The authorities worked fast, the flames faster. That night a half-burned pile of examination papers and a completely burned Parliament House were surrounded and guarded by a cordon of police.

Observers noted cynically that the conflagration was about the only fire in a century which the Japanese have not been able to lay to the door of "Korean rebels" or an earthquake. An inventory of the damage revealed that the premises of The Japanese Times, famed sheetlet of the Kokusai News Agency, had been badly singed.

As for the destroyed Parliament building, rebuilt after a former fire 30 odd years ago, "it was universally conceded to have been improved by the calamity." Built at the worst "period" of Occidental architecture, it had become delapidated with the decades; and plans for a new building have been in progress for years.

Neither the House of Peers nor the House of Representatives was in session when incendiary peevishness seized the candidates.