d care
something about their representatives?"

The gentleman from the south of Ireland laughed aloud. "Very clear it
is," he said, "that you have made your acquaintance with my dear
countrymen in America, or in England perhaps--not in Ireland. Look at
Thurles, in January '85! The voters selected O'Ryan; Parnell ordered him
off, and made them take O'Connor! The voters take their members to-day
from the League--that is, from Mr. Parnell, just as they used to take
them from the landlords. What Lord Clanricarde said in Galway, when he
made all those fagot votes by cutting up his farms, that he could return
his grey mare to Parliament if he liked, Mr. Parnell can say with just
as much truth to-day of any Nationalist seat in the country. I tell
you, the secret of his power is that he understands the Irish people,
and how to ride them. He is a Protestant-ascendency man by blood, and he
is fighting the unlucky devils of landlords to-day by the old 'landlord'
methods that came to him with his mother's milk--that is rightly
speaking, I should say, with his father's," and here he burst out
laughing at his own bull--"for his mother, poor lady, she was an
American."

"Thank you," I said.

"Oh, no harm at all! But did you ever know her? An odd woman she was,
and is."

"Her father," I replied, "was a gallant American sailor of Scottish
blood."

"Oh yes, and is it true that he got a great hatred of England from being
captured in the _Chesapeake_ by the English Captain Broke? I always
heard that."

I explained that there were historical difficulties in the way of
accepting this legend, and that Commodore Stewart's experiences, during
the war of 1812, had been those of a captor, not of a captive.

"Well, a clever woman she is, only very odd. 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 t