' of Science in Professor TYNDALL'S furious
fulminations from the Alps?"

"Nay, nay, not so," he sobbed, insanely.

"You may have been endeavouring to reconcile all Mr. GLADSTONE'S
Home-Rule utterances during the last ten years, to identify the Mr.
BRIGHT of to-day with the People's Tribune of forty years syne, to
measure the motives of Mr. CHAMBERLAIN, or appraise the intrinsic
importance of JESSE, 'the Member for Three Acres and a Cow?'"

"Alas, no!"

"Humph! You cannot possibly have been so foolish as to venture the
brain-dizzying dangers of a course of the 'Thunderer's' tempestuous
Home-Rule leaders?"

He had not, and intimated as much, mournfully.

"Dear me! Desperate man, _do_ not say that you have been trying to
analyse the authoritative 'Analyses' of this year's County Cricketing,
to test their apportionment of champion honours, or track out their
distracting decimals to their last hidden lair!"

"Worse than that--far worse!" he moonily muttered.

"You alarm me, rash man!" I cried. "Can it possibly be that from a
comparison of the works of the (Sporting) Prophets you have foolishly
essayed to spot the winner of the coming St. Leger?"

"No such luck," said he, with a shudder.

I drew near to him, and whispered low in his ear--

"Have you--_have_ you been seeking the meaning of the verses of some
peer-poet in the _Morning Post_?"

"Would--_would_ it were but that," he groaned, picking a single straw
from the truss or so that stuck porcupine-quill-wise in his tangled fell
of hair.

"I have it!" I cried. "You have an attack of veritable 'Whitmania,'
arising from a too long indulgence in the intoxicating yet enervating
flow of Swinburnian superlatives?"

"The deuce a bit of it," he snapped, testily.

I was growing impatient, and inclined "to give it up."

"Oh! this is worse than ARGYLL on Political Economy, or a Double
Acrostic!" I grumbled, angrily. "What in the name of Eleusis _have_ you
been up to?"

"_Listen!_" he whispered, placing his lips close to my ears; "listen,
and marvel if you may; aid me if you can. _I have been trying, by a
comparison of the comments thereupon in the various party papers, to
understand the real significance of a_ BYE-ELECTION!!!"

"Miserable man!" I gasped, "that way indeed Madness lies. Know you not
that human imbecility in those identical comments reaches its absolutely
'lowest deep' of abject folly and crazy inconsequence. Know you not that
nothing--positivel