to be fitting candidates.  The old doctor yielded for another year, although at the end of the second year he was called upon to pay a sum of three hundred pounds, which was then due by Phineas to creditors in London.  When the doctor’s male friends in and about Killaloe heard that he had done so, they said that he was doting.  Not one of the Miss Finns was as yet married; and, after all that had been said about the doctor’s wealth, it was supposed that there would not be above five hundred pounds a year among them all, were he to give up his profession.  But the doctor, when he paid that three hundred pounds for his son, buckled to his work again, though he had for twelve months talked of giving up the midwifery.  He buckled to again, to the great disgust of Dr. Duggin, who at this time said very ill-natured things about young Phineas.

At the end of the three years Phineas was called to the Bar, and immediately received a letter from his father asking minutely as to his professional intentions.  His father recommended him to settle in Dublin, and promised the one hundred and fifty pounds for three more years, on condition that this advice was followed.  He did not absolutely say that the allowance would be stopped if the advice were not followed, but that was plainly to be implied.  That letter came at the moment of a dissolution of Parliament.  Lord de Terrier, the Conservative Prime Minister, who had now been in office for the almost unprecedentedly long period of fifteen months, had found that he could not face continued majorities against him in the House of Commons, and had dissolved the House.  Rumour declared that he would have much preferred to resign, and betake himself once again to the easy glories of opposition; but his party had naturally been obdurate with him, and he had resolved to appeal to the country.  When Phineas received his father’s letter, it had just been suggested to him at the Reform Club that he should stand for the Irish borough of Loughshane.

This proposition had taken Phineas Finn so much by surprise that when first made to him by Barrington Erle it took his breath away.  What! he stand for Parliament, twenty-four years old, with no vestige of property belonging to him, without a penny in his purse, as completely dependent on his father as he was when he first went to school at eleven years of age!  And for Loughshane, a little borough in the county Galway, for which a brother of that fine old Irish peer, the Earl of Tulla, had been sitting for the last twenty years,—­a fine, high-minded representative of the thorough-going Orange Protestant feeling of Ireland!  And the Earl of Tulla, to whom almost all Loughshane belonged,—­or at any rate the land about Loughshane,—­was one of his father’s staunchest friends!  Loughshane is in county Galway, but the Earl of Tulla usually lived at his seat in county Clare, not more than ten miles from Killaloe, and always confided his gouty feet, and the weak nerves of the old countess,