She was a great terror, I remember, to a worthy Protestant parson, near Avondale; she used to come at him quite unexpectedly with such a power of theological discussion, and put him beside himself with questions he couldn't answer." "Very likely," I replied, "but she has transferred her interest to politics now; and she had the good sense, at the Chicago Convention in 1886, to warn the physical-force men against showing their hand too plainly in support of her son." A curious conversation, as showing the personal bitterness of politics here.

It reminded me of Dr.Duche's description in his famous letter to Washington of the party which carried the Declaration of Independence through the Continental Congress.

But it had a special interest for me as confirming the inferences I have often drawn as to Mr.Parnell's relations with his party, from his singular and complete isolation among them.

I remember the profound astonishment of my young friend Mr.D----, of New York, who, as the son of, perhaps, the most conspicuous and influential American advocate of Home Rule, had confidently counted upon seeing Mr.Parnell in London, when he found that the most important member of the Irish Parliamentary party, in point of position, was utterly unable to get at Mr.Parnell for him, or even to ascertain where Mr.Parnell could be reached by letter.
Though a staunch Unionist, Sir Michael is no blind admirer of things as they are, nor even a thick-and-thin partisan of English rule in Ireland.
"If you will have the Irish difficulty in a nutshell," he is reported to have said to a prosy British politician, "here it is: It is simply a very dull people trying to govern a very bright people." He has quick and wide intellectual sympathies, or, as he put it to a lawyer who was kindly enlightening him about some matters of scientific notoriety, "I don't live in a cupboard myself." His own terse summing up of the Irish difficulty could hardly be better illustrated than by the current story of the discomfiture of an English Treasury official, who came into his official chambers to complain of the expenditure for fuel in the Court over which he presides.

The Lord Chief-Justice looked at him quietly while he set forth his errand, and then, ringing a bell on his table, said to the servant who responded: "Tell Mary the man has come about the coals." At Sir Michael's I had some conversation also with Mr.Justice Murphy, who won a great reputation in connection with those murders in the Phoenix Park, which went near to breaking the heart and hope of poor Father Burke, and with Lord and Lady Ashbourne, whom I had not seen since I met them some years ago under the hospitable roof of Lord Houghton.