He waved his hand mildly, and with a smile, and Sir Henry James was allowed to proceed to the solemn end of his solemn harangue.
[Sidenote: A visit to the Lords.] It is not often that a rational man takes the trouble of paying a visit to the House of Lords.

But that assembly was certainly worth a visit on May 1st.

When the fight in Woodford, County Galway, was at its height, and everybody was repeating the name of Lord Clanricarde, people began to ask if there were ever such a person, or if he were not merely the creation of some morbid imagination--desirous of conjuring up a human bogey for the purpose of demonstrating the iniquities of Irish landlordism.

The story on the estate which he owned, and whose destinies he controlled, was that, on one occasion, a strange spectral figure had been seen following the coffin of the old Clanricarde to the tomb of his fathers; that the figure had disappeared as suddenly and as noiselessly as it had come; that it had not reappeared even on the solemn occasion when again the historic and century-old vaults of the family graveyard had opened to receive the late lord's wife and the existing lord's mother.

Writing his missives from afar--invisible, unapproachable, unknown--or known, rather, only by harsh refusal--by dogged, obdurate rejection of all terms--save the full pound of flesh--not even rendered human by passionate and eloquent outburst of remonstrance, but represented by thin, brief, business-like and curt notes as of a very crusty solicitor--such Lord Clanricarde appeared to the imaginations of the people of the district of which he was almost the supreme master.
There were riots--fierce conflicts extending over days--then dreary sentences of lengthy imprisonments, with gaol tragedies; but still this strange, dry, inarticulate, obstinate figure remained immutable, always invisible, unapproachable, obdurate, spectral.