“But the constituencies,” I urged, “surely the voters must know and care something about their representatives?”

The gentleman from the south of Ireland laughed aloud.  “Very clear it is,” he said, “that you have made your acquaintance with my dear countrymen in America, or in England perhaps—­not in Ireland.  Look at Thurles, in January ’85!  The voters selected O’Ryan; Parnell ordered him off, and made them take O’Connor!  The voters take their members to-day from the League—­that is, from Mr. Parnell, just as they used to take them from the landlords.  What Lord Clanricarde said in Galway, when he made all those fagot votes by cutting up his farms, that he could return his grey mare to Parliament if he liked, Mr. Parnell can say with just as much truth to-day of any Nationalist seat in the country.  I tell you, the secret of his power is that he understands the Irish people, and how to ride them.  He is a Protestant-ascendency man by blood, and he is fighting the unlucky devils of landlords to-day by the old ‘landlord’ methods that came to him with his mother’s milk—­that is rightly speaking, I should say, with his father’s,” and here he burst out laughing at his own bull—­“for his mother, poor lady, she was an American.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Oh, no harm at all!  But did you ever know her?  An odd woman she was, and is.”

“Her father,” I replied, “was a gallant American sailor of Scottish blood.”

“Oh yes, and is it true that he got a great hatred of England from being captured in the Chesapeake by the English Captain Broke?  I always heard that.”

I explained that there were historical difficulties in the way of accepting this legend, and that Commodore Stewart’s experiences, during the war of 1812, had been those of a captor, not of a captive.

“Well, a clever woman she is, only very odd.  She was a great terror, I remember, to a worthy Protestant parson, near Avondale; she used to come at him quite unexpectedly with such a power of theological discussion, and put him beside himself with questions he couldn’t answer.”

“Very likely,” I replied, “but she has transferred her interest to politics now; and she had the good sense, at the Chicago Convention in 1886, to warn the physical-force men against showing their hand too plainly in support of her son.”

A curious conversation, as showing the personal bitterness of politics here.  It reminded me of Dr. Duche’s description in his famous letter to Washington of the party which carried the Declaration of Independence through the Continental Congress.  But it had a special interest for me as confirming the inferences I have often drawn as to Mr. Parnell’s relations with his party, from his singular and complete isolation among them.  I remember the profound astonishment of my young friend Mr. D——­, of New York, who, as the son of, perhaps, the most conspicuous and influential American advocate of Home Rule, had confidently counted upon seeing Mr. Parnell in London, when he found that the most important member of the Irish Parliamentary party, in point of position, was utterly unable to get at Mr. Parnell for him, or even to ascertain where Mr. Parnell could be reached by letter.