cause of India and Ireland in that stern Star Chamber. But how was he to enter it? He thought of his native town, Ennis, that "pole-star of the south," as its greatest poet, Dan Dermody, had called it with exquisite propriety, but he knew too well that no representative of an Irish constituency had a chance of a hearing in an alien and intolerant assembly. He must seek this honour from-might he not say, confer this honour on?-an English constituency; but an English constituency in which the dear old country was weightily and worthily represented. He had chosen Wefton, and he had chosen well. (Wild cheering.) He had come to Wefton as he had gone to India, to defend the defenceless and represent the unrepresented. For who represented the Irishmen of Wefton? Mr. Pickles? Yes, as the cuckoo represents the sparrows she smothers in their own nest. He had got into the nest under false pretences, and now that he was big enough he showed his true colours. His true colours? Were they his true colours? Bedad, nobody knew. He read in the Wefton Witness that morning a list of the Liberal candidates in the Parliament just dissolved in which Mr. Pickles' name did not appear; but at the foot of the list was a note explaining the omission. The editor had no return of Mr. Pickles' politics later than the day before yesterday, so he couldn't safely count him. Faith, the poor editor was like Paddy Burke, the omedhaun of Clonakilty.

Paudheen," said his master, "did ye count the litter of pigs?" "I did, yere honour, barring one little one, and he ran about so I couldn't count him at all at all."

But if there was some doubt as to whom Mr. Pickles represented, there was no doubt at all as to whom he did not represent. He did not represent the Irishmen of Wefton. The Irish in Wefton had no more bitter enemy. Was there a single Irishman in his works? Was there a single Irishman in his service? Was there an Irishman tolerated even in his Institute? cried Bob, drawing a bold bow at a venture. Nay, it was well known that "no Irish need apply" to him even for justice on the bench. And this man, who treats you as outlaws, asks you for your vote. (Three groans for Josh, given with heart-shaking savageness.) Then there was a surging towards the platform, by which a woman had her baby nearly crushed. Bob, with great presence of mind, stooped over and had the baby handed up to him, to the frantic delight of the audience. It was a great stroke for Bob, though not, perhaps, for the baby, which he held by the neck and heels as if he was measuring it, and which howled thereat like a demon. "Give it the breast, sir. Lord bless you, sir, give it the breast," shouted a facetious youth in the gallery in an accent of life and death earnestness. (Roars of laughter, during which the mother was hoisted on to the platform, and received the racked infant with a grateful curtsey.) I'm not a mother myself, resumed Bob in a plaintive tone, but faith, I'm as fit to nurse a baby as Mr. Pickles is to nurse a constituency. He gives it the bottle instead of the milk of human kindness. (This allusion to Mr. Pickles being a

brewer was taken up in a moment and uproariously received.) "And I tell you what, boys, I'd rather send that baby to Parliament as your representative than Mr. Josiah Pickles. It would make a deal more noise there, and if it did do little good, it 'ud do no mischief. Yes, by George, if you had to choose between Josh and the baby, I'd say, 'plump for the baby,' for the same reason that Mick Molloy told me yesterday he stuck an old hat in his broken window, not to let in the light, but to keep out the rain." Then he proceeded to describe the millennium which the baby would live to see, and of which they were now to lay the foundation stone by the election of Mr. Crowe.

We've given but a meagre epitome of one of Bob's speeches, all of which, by the way, owed their success rather to the manner than the matter at the command of the orator. Bob's jovial, genial manner, rolling voice, and rich Clare brogue, put on double strong for the occasion, were irresistible with an Irish audience. And not the Irish only, but the English Radicals, flocked to hear him as his fame spread, and Bob for the nonce became the most popular man in Wefton with his own party. To the other side he was, of course, proportionately detestable. Now if the Radicals had the best speakers-as truly they had-on their side, the Tories had the best caricaturists, and poor Bob therefore was gibbeted in every shop-window in Wefton. He and Bindon were sometimes represented as "carpet-baggers," Bindon as thin as a lath, and Bob as fat as Falstaff. Indeed, Falstaff was the usual character in which Bob figured when he was not represented as a carpet-bagger or as a wild Irishman. In one cartoon as Falstaff one of his wild exaggerations streamed out of his mouth, while underneath was the quotation, "These lies are like their father that begets them, gross as a mountain, open, palpable." In another a piece of sleuthering blarney was on his lips, and underneath the quotation, "Didst thou never see Titan kiss a dish of butter?" In another he was represented as spouting a high-falutin panegyric on Erin to an audience wholly hidden from him under his enormous paunch, and underneath, "How now, my sweet creature of bombast! How long is't ago, Bob, since thou sawest thine own knee?" till poor Bob, like Warren Hastings, began to believe himself the monster his enemies painted him. He went privately and got himself weighed-232 lbs. It wasn't so monstrous. But perhaps his stomach was disproportionately prominent. He looked at it in and out of the glass twenty times a day from every point of view except that of which his audience in the cartoon (sitting as it were under the shadow of a great rock) had the command. He yearned to ask an impartial opinion on the point, but it was a difficult and delicate subject to broach, even to a friend. Besides, the only friend he could broach it to, Bindon, was as jocose on the subject as the cartoons themselves. To him Bob was always "Sweet Jack," "Plump Jack," or "Sir John Sack and Sugar;" and Bob's occasional melancholy meditations upon this infirmity of the flesh, were mocked by the advice, "A plague of sighing

and grief, it blows a man up like a bladder." Thus Bob's trouble, like all incommunicable miseries, was consuming. For the present, however, the excitement of the contest and the opportunities of revenge it gave him on the enemy kept him from brooding over it. If the windows abused him, the walls flattered him, for "Mr. Robert Sagar will address &c." appeared on every dead wall in letters large as those announcing the appearances of the candidates themselves. And if a new caricature of him appeared every morning, a new oratorical triumph consoled him every evening. For Bob never tired of speaking, and his audiences never tired of hearing him. They would have thought themselves repaid for being packed like herrings in a barrel, if they had only seen Bob come rolling on to the front of the platform, with a face like the welcome of an Irish hearth, frank, free-and-easy, glowing, and generous, and heard him take his revenge, as he always did in the first few sentences. "Well, boys," he would say, in a brogue round and rich as a roll of Cork butter; "well, boys, what's the news with ye to-night? Have ye seen my new portrait?" Then, with a startling change of manner, "Isn't it disgraceful? For what do you think they call me now?" half a minute's pause, during which you might have heard a pin drop, for Bob's rage seemed so savage that everyone expected the announcement of a new and abominable cartoon. They call me AN IRISHMAN.” At this unexpected calumny there was of course a roar of laughter, all the more hearty for the preceding suspense. "Ay, ye may laugh," continued Bob, without the least relaxation of muscle or manner, "but a man had better be called a thief than an Irishman in this country; and Josh knows that, and takes advantage of it, and thinks he'll win the election by it, and blackguards me and you and our country in every window in Wefton, and then-asks you for your vote," with a sudden drop of the voice which was very effective. "Ye'll give it to him, won't ye Ye'll go to him, and ye'll say to him, 'Mr. Pickles, yere honour, don't be too hard on us. You shut us out from your Institute, you shut us out from your works, you shut us out from justice when you're on the bench, you'd shut us out from Wefton if you could, ay, and from England if you could. But ye'll not shut us out from the polling-booths, yere honour, will ye? Ye'll allow us to vote for ye? God bless yere honour, do now.' Maybe he'll let ye. If not, ye'll have to put up with Mr. Bindon Crowe, who is only one of yourselves, only an Irishman, who is not ashamed of his country, and not ashamed of his family" (here a signifi· cant pause to let the audience take in the allusion to Mr. Pickles' neglect of his niece, which was taken in accordingly with intense gusto); "and not ashamed of his colours. He doesn't change his colours like the chameleon to suit the prevailing hue-yellow when yellow is at the top, blue when blue. No, he's not ashamed of his colour, though it's not blue, and it's not yellow, but green. That's his colour, boys, and to that he'll stick, as nature sticks to it, for the blue goes with the spring, and the yellow with the autumn, but green lives and lasts all the year round.

"When laws can stop the blades of grass
From growing as they grow;

And when the leaves in summer time
Their colour dare not show;
Then he'll change that colour too

He wears in his caubeen,

But till that day, please God, he'll stick

To the wearing of the green."

Bob might have been giving out a hymn, for the audience rose like one man, and sang the truly spirit-stirring song, The Wearing of the Green, amid the wildest excitement.

From the foregoing specimen it will be seen that Bob's eloquence was dramatic, and gave scope for good acting, and to this it owed its success, for Bob was a born actor. As with every successful speaker, it was not what he said but how he said it, that told, and an extract from his speeches gives no better idea of their effect than the mere reading of The Wearing of the Green gives an idea of its effect when sung by a crowd of excited Irishmen.

Anyhow, Bob's eloquence, such as it was, answered its purpose. Every Irishman in Wefton, out of jail or a sick bed, went to the poll and voted for Bindon, and the Irish vote turned the election.

It was a glorious triumph, of which Bob deserved much of the credit and assumed it all. The poll was no sooner declared late on Thursday night than Bob anticipated the candidates by starting up and in stentorian tones thanking the electors. It was Bob, too, not Bindon, who was chaired, a really stupendous honour when his weight is considered. Of course, two days later he appeared in a cartoon as Falstaff in the buck-basket, coiled in it like a colossal snake, covered with filthy Irish rags, and carried by twenty staggering men to be pitched into the Irish Channel. This cartoon Bob never saw. He had disappeared from Wefton. Instead of waiting to enjoy (and no man would have enjoyed them more) the golden opinions bought from all sorts of people to be worn now in their newest gloss, he had fled, no man knew why or whither. He might have been burked by the janissaries of the furious Pickles for all anyone knew, but Mabel and Mabel only knew that some awful and ineffable business summoned him away. Speculation was rife about this grave mystery. His political friends hinted that he was hurried off by telegram to Ireland to advise Mr. Parnell. His foes gave out that he was hurried off to jail to join the Claimant on a kindred charge of forgery. Bindon believed he had gone to pick up a seat somewhere for himself, for Bob had more than once bragged to him of this being in his power. Mabel imagined from his sad and solemn and mysterious

leave-taking that he had been summoned to help some old friend out of a horrible scrape. He had told her (the day after the election and two days before she heard from Lawley of George's fate) that he had to leave Wefton at once on very private and pressing business, but what it was, where it took him, and how long it would keep him, he had not hinted. The truth was, Bob had become an Omphalopsychyte. Those thrice accursed cartoons had brought on stomach on the brain. An advertisement of a famous medicine with the attractive heading "No more Stomachs" caught his eye in the Wefton Witness. The advertisement referred to an article in the Lancet. The article in the Lancet said it was either double or quits, but that whether the medicine aggravated or abated the stomach, the patient must take it in retirement. Double or quits! It was an awful risk. He would risk it. He did. In three weeks he left his lonely cottage in Wales to get to the nearest scales. He was 263 lbs. !

CHAPTER XLIV.

Two MORE PROPOSALS.

DURING the year which has elapsed since we last saw Mabel, Lady Saddlethwaite contrived that she should meet Lawley occasionally and hear of him continually; and all that she saw and heard of him forced her to feel that he was more deeply and wretchedly in love with her than ever. And, indeed, Lawley was not happy about his prospects. Lady Saddlethwaite admitted that the only symptom she could see of the softening of Mabel's sorrow was her willingness, or rather eagerness, to talk about George and his fate--a subject from which she shrank in the first weeks of her bereavement. On the other hand, it is true, Lawley's love for her was certainly the next thing in her thoughts and among her troubles. Lady Saddlethwaite had not the least doubt in the world that Mabel's yielding was only a question of time, though of a longer time than she had anticipated; but Lawley was not sanguine. He had all a lover's impatience, without a lover's hopefulness.

"I am crying for the moon, Lady Saddlethwaite."

"I don't think she's quite so changeable as that," she answered smiling, "but she'll change."

"There's not much sign of it."

"There's every sign of it.

about him."

She thinks about you almost as much as

"Yes, but very differently. She thinks of me as a creditor to whom she owes what she can't pay. It's not so, but I can see she thinks it is so, and that's against me. A woman likes to give her love, not pay it, Lady Saddlethwaite."

"I thought we were supposed to pay it. You first give us your love and we return it; isn't it so? And that's the debt which is on Mabel's