The people were asking themselves what would happen, when Mr. Gladstone entered the House; but if there had been any desire to mark the occasion, he himself prevented it.  He dropped more quietly into his seat than usual, and at the moment when, to a thin House, Sir William was giving one of those gentle and beatific answers to which I have already alluded.  To judge by Mr. Gladstone’s quietness of entrance, nothing unusual had happened to him, and he himself had declined even to talk about the matter.  And yet there was a certain look as of reverie on his face—­as though of a man who had looked into that dark and hideous abyss called Death.  He had not been looking very well for some days, and perhaps there was not—­though imagination saw it—­a deadlier pallor than usual on the face.  But it was only when he was sitting on the deserted bench beside Sir William Harcourt that one had an opportunity of detecting any difference between his usual appearance and his appearance at that particular moment.  The minute he had any part to take in the proceedings of the House, he was just as alert, cheerful, self-composed as ever.  This wonderful man is as much a miracle physically as mentally.  The giant intellect is backed by a steady nerve, the perfect mind by the perfect body.  And thus he is able to go through trials, dangers, fatigues, which would destroy any ordinary man, as though nothing had occurred.  During this week, indeed, he was especially playful.  On the Tuesday night, when the onslaught was being made on Mr. Bryce, Sir Henry James spoke of Lord Sefton as being a strong Liberal.  Mr. Gladstone uttered a quiet, gentle, deprecatory “Oh!” whereupon Sir Henry James reiterated his statement with a look of surprise and shock.  Mr. Gladstone didn’t depart from his attitude of gentle and almost plaintive remonstrance.  He waved his hand mildly, and with a smile, and Sir Henry James was allowed to proceed to the solemn end of his solemn harangue.

[Sidenote:  A visit to the Lords.]

It is not often that a rational man takes the trouble of paying a visit to the House of Lords.  But that assembly was certainly worth a visit on May 1st.  When the fight in Woodford, County Galway, was at its height, and everybody was repeating the name of Lord Clanricarde, people began to ask if there were ever such a person, or if he were not merely the creation of some morbid imagination—­desirous of conjuring up a human bogey for the purpose of demonstrating the iniquities of Irish landlordism.  The story on the estate which he owned, and whose destinies he controlled, was that, on one occasion, a strange spectral figure had been seen following the coffin of the old Clanricarde to the tomb of his fathers; that the figure had disappeared as suddenly and as noiselessly as it had come; that it had not reappeared even on the solemn occasion when again the historic and century-old vaults of the family graveyard had opened to receive the late lord’s wife and the