and in a voice not unduly pitched.  And yet there were those traces of fatigue to which I have alluded, and I have since heard that one of the few occasions in his life when Mr. Gladstone had a sleepless night was on the night before he introduced his second great Home Rule Bill.  And it should be added that, stirring and eloquent as were the opening sentences, they were not listened to by the House with that extraordinary enthusiasm which, on other occasions, sentences of this splendid eloquence would have elicited.  For what really the House wanted to learn was the great enigma which had been kept for seven long years—­in spite of protests, hypocritical appeals, and, ofttimes, tedious remonstrance from over-zealous and over-fussy friends.

[Sidenote:  The Bill.]

By the time Mr. Gladstone had got to the Bill, he had exhausted a good deal of his stock of voice, and yet he seemed to be less dependent than usual on the mysterious compound which Mrs. Gladstone mixes with her own wifely hand for those solemn occasions.  It appeared that both she and her husband had somewhat dreaded the ordeal.  The bottle which Mr. Gladstone usually brings with him is about the size of those small, stunted little jars in which, in the days of our youth, the young buck kept his bear’s grease, or other ornament of the toilet.  But on Monday Mr. Gladstone was armed with a large blue bottle—­somewhat like one of those 8 oz. medicine bottles which stand so often beside our beds in this age of sleeplessness and worry.  Nevertheless, Mr. Gladstone and his wife had miscalculated, for on two occasions only throughout the entire speech did he have to make application for sustenance to the medicine bottle.  Another precaution which had been taken turned out also to be unnecessary.  The Premier’s eyesight is not as good as it was a few years ago; and he sometimes finds it difficult to read anything but the biggest print.  For this reason, elaborate preparations had been made for helping his eyesight.  On the table before the Speaker’s chair there was a small lamp—­somewhat like a student’s lamp.  This also turned out to be unnecessary, for the Old Man was able to read his notes without the smallest difficulty; and the speech had come to a conclusion long before the hour when the deepening shadows make it hard to read by the light from the glass roof of the House.

[Sidenote:  The peroration.]

At last, the latest details had been given; the Old Man approached his peroration.  By this time the voice had sunk in parts to a low whisper, and the deathly hue of the beautiful face had grown deeper.  There was something that almost inspired awe as one looked at that strange, curious, solitary figure in the growing darkness.  The intense strain on the House had finally exhausted it, and there had come a silence that had in it the solemnity, the strange stillness, the rapt emotion of some sublime service in a great cathedral rather than the beginning of