Phineas reached London early in the morning, and went home to bed for an hour or so.  The House was to meet on that very day, and he intended to begin his parliamentary duties at once if he should find it possible to get some one to accompany him; He felt that he should lack courage to go down to Westminster Hall alone, and explain to the policeman and door-keepers that he was the man who had just been elected member for Loughshane.  So about noon he went into the Reform Club, and there he found a great crowd of men, among whom there was a plentiful sprinkling of members.  Erle saw him in a moment, and came to him with congratulations.

“So you’re all right, Finn,” said he.

“Yes; I’m all right,—­I didn’t have much doubt about it when I went over.”

“I never heard of a fellow with such a run of luck,” said Erle.  “It’s just one of those flukes that occur once in a dozen elections.  Any one on earth might have got in without spending a shilling.”

Phineas didn’t at all like this.  “I don’t think any one could have got in,” said he, “without knowing Lord Tulla.”

“Lord Tulla was nowhere, my dear boy, and could have nothing to say to it.  But never mind that.  You meet me in the lobby at two.  There’ll be a lot of us there, and we’ll go in together.  Have you seen Fitzgibbon?” Then Barrington Erle went off to other business, and Finn was congratulated by other men.  But it seemed to him that the congratulations of his friends were not hearty.  He spoke to some men, of whom he thought that he knew they would have given their eyes to be in Parliament;—­and yet they spoke of his success as being a very ordinary thing.  “Well, my boy, I hope you like it,” said one middle-aged gentleman whom he had known ever since he came up to London.  “The difference is between working for nothing and working for money.  You’ll have to work for nothing now.”

“That’s about it, I suppose,” said Phineas.

“They say the House is a comfortable club,” said the middle-aged friend, “but I confess that I shouldn’t like being rung away from my dinner myself.”

At two punctually Phineas was in the lobby at Westminster, and then he found himself taken into the House with a crowd of other men.  The old and young, and they who were neither old nor young, were mingled together, and there seemed to be very little respect of persons.  On three or four occasions there was some cheering when a popular man or a great leader came in; but the work of the day left but little clear impression on the mind of the young member.  He was confused, half elated, half disappointed, and had not his wits about him.  He found himself constantly regretting that he was there; and as constantly telling himself that he, hardly yet twenty-five, without a shilling of his own, had achieved an entrance into that assembly which by the consent of all men is the greatest in the world, and which many of the rich magnates of the country had in vain spent heaps of