he 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. Lord Ashbourne was then Mr. Gibson, Q.C. He is now the Lord
Chancellor of Ireland, and the author of the Land Purchase Act of 1885,
which many well-informed and sensible men regard as the Magna Charta of
peace in Ireland, while others of equal authority assure me that by
reversing the principle of the Bright clauses in the Act of 1871 it has
encouraged the tenants to expect an eventual concession of the
land-ownership to them on merel