application," he repeated bitterly. "In future! No, Right Honourable Floppington, I will make no more applications!" He thrust the letter into his pocket, and, ignoring his mother's exclamation of inquiry, strode into the street to cool his aching forehead, and dashed against a young man whom he had not met since the Sunday when he encountered him outside the church. The young man looked at him with a curious pity, and put out his hand.

"What's the hurry, old man?" he said.

The painter muttered a few inaudible words and was passing on, but his acquaintance stopped him.

"If you've got nothing to do you may as well come my way. I see you've got your best togs on. Perhaps you are going to see the show."

"What show?"

"Down Westminster way, you know. I'm taking a half-holiday to see all the big pots going to Parliament, don't you know? They say the Prince of Wales'll be there. I expect it will be a swell affair. Come along, old chap, and give Floppy a cheer on his way." The young man linked the painter's arm in his, but it was withdrawn with violence.

"Cheer Floppington!" gasped Jack.

"Why not?"

"Cheer the man that for his own vain-glory would ruin the country!"

"Oh, come! I ain't quite sure that I agree with his policy myself. But you can't help admiring the man."

"I can help it, and I do!" he said furiously. The young man struck his brow with his palm.

"What a fool I am !" he cried. "Of course, Floppy is your red rag. Now look here, Jack. Let me give you a bit of friendly advice. Don't you worry your head so much about Floppington. It's unhealthy, and it'll lead to no good. You got yourself turned out of the Foresters' for hissing him, and then you were satisfied. You're only knocking your head against a brick wall. There's no other Radical so down on him as you. He's a great man; there's no gainsaying that."

The calm superiority of this lecture irritated the usually composed painter to the pitch of madness. He seemed to lose his balance completely. With a frenzied laugh he bent down and hissed in the lecturer's ears:

"He a great man! He is a vile impostor."

"I dare say," replied the young man with good-humoured tolerance. "Well, ta-ta, if you will be pig-headed."

"But his career will be over sooner than the world imagines," the infuriated painter exclaimed.

"The wish is father to the thought, old chap!" said the young man, laughing. "Ta-ta!"

He had not taken twenty steps when the painter made a gesture

of despair, tottered back into the parlour, and buried his face in his hands.

"Is all this torture driving me mad?" he moaned. "I dare not stay here another day, or I shall lose my reason altogether. Miserable creature of impulse that I am, shall I never guide myself by intellectual principles? Shame on me to have reviled a great and noble man, any one of whose days is a fiery reproach to my whole life of far niente. My God, I repent. The harmonies of the universe are immeasurably delicate. Change the place of any two notes and discord enters into the music of the spheres."

...

The Premier ceased. For three and a half hours the flower of English life and the élite of foreign residents and visitors had been under the spell of the magician as he expounded, in immortal words, his magnificent scheme. It was a wonderful effort of constructive statesmanship, and, as the great Minister sat down, a wild delirium of applause shook the building to its centre. the Premier, used as he was to being the focus of enthusiasm, the moment was one which concentrated the rapture of a lifetime. Beyond this he felt that life had now nothing to offer.

For

The same evening the painter, his cadaverous countenance proving him quite unfit for his enterprise, glided furtively out of the "Star Dining Rooms," and, turning backwards for a moment, he raised his hands towards the peaceful evening sky. "Ave atque vale," he said in low, earnest tones. “Ave atque

vale."

Book DEE.

CHAPTER I.

A NATIONAL TRAGEDY.

OF the Irish Members had kept their anticipatory wake over the Union on the night before its condemnation, their constituents waited a day longer before abandoning themselves to the performance of the funeral rites. But when the telegraph offices sent out the news that "the darlint Floppy" had given the lie to rumour by exaggerating its wildest exaggerations; when they found that they were to be separated from the United Kingdom as cleanly as the members of their national quadruped were cloven asunder by the mechanical contrivances of Porkopolis; the crowds that seethed around the offices boiled over. And as a child takes hold of a wooden or cardboard man, and, acting upon the mobile anatomy, now moves its legs, now extends its arms, and now opens its mouth; so did the spirit of joy take hold of Paddy, and cause his legs to leap in triumph, his arms to elevate themselves in blessing, and his mouth to open for the emission of eloquence or the reception of whisky. All night long the streets of the secessionist towns resounded with the music of "Erin-go-bragh" and other national airs, and with the tramp of promenading citizens. Effigies of the people's Floppy were carried through the streets, wreathed with laurel and shamrock, and wrapped in green and American flags, and, if an occasional affray diversified the proceedings, this was only what was to be expected in a wake. Morpheus (locally known as Murphy) fled in affright and sought refuge in the lecture halls and churches of the Antipodes.

Nor was the excitement in the Sister Isle of England much less intense. Preparations were made by the Conservative and a few of the Liberal associations throughout the country to congratulate the Premier on his gigantic and daring scheme; pens were busy in

every newspaper office in Great Britain, describing or evolving the scene in the House, and writing criticisms, more or less worthless, upon the reforms projected; and so overcome was the English Philistine by the consciousness of his own magnanimity, that he could do nothing but compare notes about it with his fellowfeelers.

All this upwelling and ebullition of enthusiasm was delightful. Politics is the poetry of the average man; it gives him a wider outlook and lifts him above the sordid cares of every day; it makes him feel that he is an important unit in a great party in a glorious nationality. And if the Politics à la mode were sometimes devoid of rhyme or reason, they only offered a more striking parallel to much of the poetry on which the æsthetic mind was nourished.

On this occasion the promise of coming excitement was even more enchanting than the actual first-fruits. The Separation Bill would, of course, be carried, but not without the struggle which was the sauce to the titbit. It was, perhaps, even to be regretted that the contest should be such a walk-over for Floppington. The fact was that the Minister had thrown a glamour over his countrymen. His influence in the country was, in short, equal to his charm in society; and that is not saying a little. Just as on his coming out of his mistaken reserve and shyness, the magnetism of his presence attracted to him a host of new friends, and linked his old ones closer to his soul by electric chains; so the parallel transformation of his political personality, the new vigour of his dialectic, the unaffected directness of his rhetoric, and the democratic tendency of his measures, fascinated the universal heart and created for him an army of disciples that would have followed him to the ends of the earth and the boundaries of

common sense.

Lord Bardolph bade fair to ruin his popularity by his bitter antagonism to the Bill. The last thread that held him to his party was now snapped; for not even the most Liberal of the old Tories, not even the Conservative least reverential of the Past, could find anything but approbation for this great measure, undoing, as it did, the ill-advised reforms of 1800, and restoring the good old status quo ante. Nothing had been left to him but to cast in his lot with that hopeless minority which Screwnail was leading, and whose watchword was the integrity of the Empire.

It was remarkable, as showing the singular unanimity of the House, that even these few hide-bound Liberals admitted the justice of the main principle of the Bill, and only contended that a clause should be inserted, providing for the immediate construction of a Channel Tunnel to prevent the total severance of the two islands. Bardolph, though he agreed with them in their opposition, did not agree with its raison d'être. Like a solitary star, he wandered across the political firmament-erratic as a comet, but without the slightest vestige of a tail. And as the dire comets of the Mantuan poet foretold the horrors of civil war, so did this fiery meteor thrill the nearts of spectators with dread presages of internecine conflict.

As soon as the first rumours of the coming changes began to circulate, observers noted the popularex-Minister revolving in his eccentric path. He was first seen in Ireland calling on the men of Ulster to strike a blow, the echoes of which should reverberate to the uttermost corners of the Universe; and, wherever he went, he exhorted them with equal vehemence to destroy the Constitution for the sake of preserving the Empire.

Lord Bardolph was by no means unaware of the danger to his popularity, but a man who plays to break the bank cannot afford to be scrupulous about halfpence. The moment a reaction took place and a reaction the philosophical Bardolph felt was inevitable-Bardolph would stand alone, the only man who had not committed himself more or less to Home Rule, the one far-sighted and lofty-minded statesman in whom the country could have confidence.

A reaction did, indeed, come; but not in the way Bardolph had imagined. On the morning after Floppington's great speech in the House, the placards of the papers were of course occupied by staring capitals, all connected with the historical proceedings of the evening before. But when the second editions appeared, as on account of the enormous demand they very soon did, the lower portion of the bills was devoted to such titles as "Mysterious Explosion at 5.30 A.M. in Westminster," "Fatal Explosion in Westminster," etc. The third editions followed almost immediately with "Dynamiters in Westminster-blowing up of a stable-a man killed." By this time the evening papers were out with equally sensational headings. But this startling piece of news, which would have been a godsend to proprietors and newsboys at another period, fell flat. What the Press throughout the country was saying of the Premier's measure; how Ireland received it; what was the state of feeling in America and on the Continentthese were the topics that alone had any interest. Not even the addition to the bills of the fifth editions of "Strange Rumours," or "Startling Rumours," or "Terrible Rumours," had any appreciable effect in increasing the sufficiently extraordinary sales. But when the public of the fifth edition had read what these rumours were, a fearful shock of horror and incredulity traversed its mind. The sixth editions sold at twopence, and were exhausted in five minutes. At the seventh the price had gone up to sixpence, and the bills announced "Rumoured Assassination of the Premier"! At the tenth, announcing "Assassination of the Premier," and edged with black, the reign of fancy prices began.

Yet even then there were people who, with pale lips that belied their assurance, asserted that the report was nothing but a canard. When with the fifteenth edition of the Pall Mall Gazette, "Escape of the Murderer" was bawled out, it seemed as if London had gone mad. People fought for the journals in the streets, and the thoroughfares were crowded with loitering masses discussing the terrible tragedy with bated breath, or clamorous in invoking vengeance on the dastardly assassin, a hitherto unknown Mr. Jack