without that legitimate excuse; there were Liberal absentees as well.  Obstruction, meantime, stalked triumphantly; and when the divisions came, our strength sank down to almost invisible figures.  Ah! it was saddening to look at Mr. Gladstone’s face throughout that long morning sitting of Friday, March 10th.  There are some days that live in one’s memory, not so much as days as nights—­with the ghastly spectres of darkness—­nightmares—­hauntings of a hideous past—­anticipations of a joyless future.  Such that Friday remains in my memory—­with Mr. Gladstone’s face standing out from the surrounding figures—­pale, remote, pained.

[Sidenote:  The G.O.M. as a lecturer.]

The announcement of the following Monday came only as a surprise to those who had not been fully behind the scenes.  There were few, who knew the impression that the Friday had made, who did not feel sure that the game of pushing the Home Rule Bill on before Easy Easter was up, and that Mr. Gladstone had been beaten by the sheer brutality of Obstruction.  But still hope springs eternal in the Irish breast, and there was still the lingering feeling that Mr. Gladstone would make a further and more desperate effort to break down one of the most shameless crusades of Obstruction on which a great party had ever entered.  Indeed, Mr. Gladstone himself was responsible for a rise in the temperature of his own party on the very evening of that fateful and fatal Friday morning, when obstruction and the abandonment of their own friends had so nearly driven the Government out of office.  I could scarcely believe my eyes when at nine o’clock on that day I came down to the almost empty House—­in these evening sittings the House always looks about as cheerful as a theatre at mid-day—­and saw Mr. Gladstone on the Treasury Bench, almost radiant, and evidently full of speech, go, and spirit.  There wasn’t really the smallest necessity for his presence.  Nothing stood on the paper save one of those harmless, futile motions which are discussed with about as much interest by the House generally, as “abstract love”—­to use a bold figure of Labby in a recent debate.  It was a motion which complained that private members did not get sufficient time.  Considering that private members had used their privileges for some two weeks previously to destroy the very foundation of all representative Government—­namely, that the majority shall prevail—­the complaint seemed a little audacious.  Anyhow, a debate upon it could lead nowhere.  But the moment the resolution was proposed, up stood the Grand Old Man, and delivered a bright, sparkling little academical address, for all the world like the lecture of a very spirituel French professor to a parcel of boys from the Quartier Latin.  For the moment you could actually imagine that the Old Man had forgotten that there were such things in the world as Home Rule, Obstruction, Newmarket Lowther, and Brummagem Joe.  And all the time here were we, who could be his sons, grinding our hearts in despair—­in futile anger—­in melancholy retrospect.