I suppose I shall be considered very fantastic—­but do you know what I thought of at that very moment?  Some years ago, I stood at Epsom close to the ropes and saw Fred Archer pass me as he swept like the whirlwind to the winning-post in the last Derby he ever rode.  Between Mr. Carson and Mr. Fred Archer, especially in the profile, there is a certain and even a close resemblance; the same long lantern face, the same sunken cheeks, the same prominent mouth, the same skin dark as the gipsy’s.  Never shall I forget the look on Fred Archer’s face at the moment when I saw it—­it was but for a second—­and yet the impression dwells ineffaceable upon my memory and imagination.  There was a curious mixture of terror, resolve, hope, despair on the sunken cheeks that was almost appalling—­that look represented, embodied, summed up, as though in some sudden glimpse of another and a nether world, all the terrible and awful passions that stormed at the hearts of thousands in the great gambling panorama all around.  And there was something of the same look on the profile of Mr. Carson—­I could almost have pitied him and the party and traditions and past which he represented as I saw its death-throes marked on his suffering and fierce face.

But the speech of Mr. Carson was a clever one.  Whatever the inner eye may see in the depths of Mr. Carson’s soul, to the outward eye he has an appearance of a self-possession amounting almost to the offensive.  He is dressed almost as well as Mr. Austen Chamberlain, but, unlike Mr. Chamberlain’s promising lad—­who still has much of the graceful shyness and unsteady nerve of youth—­Mr. Carson has all the coolness, self-assertion, and hardness of the man who has passed through the fierce and tempestuous conflicts of Irish life.  Mr. Carson stands at the box and leans upon it as though he had been there all his life; he shoots his cuffs—­to use a House of Commons’ phrase—­as dexterously and almost as frequently as Mr. Gladstone; his points are stated slowly, deliberately, with that wary and watchful look of the man who has been accustomed to utter the words that consigned men to the horrors of Tullamore.  The speech of Thursday evening was a clever speech.  It wasn’t broad—­it wasn’t generous—­there was not a note in it above the tone of the Crown Prosecutor, but it was subtle, well-reasoned—­the blows were happy, and told—­and the Tories and Unionists were hugely and justly delighted.

[Sidenote:  The approach of the division.]

At last we are within sight of the end.  Friday had come, and everybody knew that this was the day which would see the division; and, after all, the division was the event of the debate.  In moments such as these you can hear the quickened throb of the House of Commons, and if you fail to notice it you soon learn it from the public.  In the lobbies outside stand scores of excited men and women begging, imploring, threatening—­using every means to get admission into the galleries to witness a historic