on her father's farm, and Dr. Hyde, still a college student who took
snuff like those Mayo county people, whose stories and songs he was
writing down. "Davitt wants followers by the thousand," O'Leary would say,
"I only want half-a-dozen." One constant caller looked at me with much
hostility, John F. Taylor, an obscure great orator. The other day in
Dublin I overheard a man murmuring to another one of his speeches as I
might some Elizabethan lyric that is in my very bones. It was delivered at
some Dublin debate, some College society perhaps. The Lord Chancellor had
spoken with balanced unemotional sentences now self-complacent, now in
derision. Taylor began hesitating and stopping for words, but after
speaking very badly for a little, straightened his figure and spoke as out
of a dream: "I am carried to another age, a nobler court, and another Lord
Chancellor is speaking. I am at the court of the first Pharaoh." Thereupon
he put into the mouth of that Egyptian all his audience had listened to,
but now it was spoken to the children of Israel. "If you have any
spirituality as you boast, why not use our great empire to spread it
through the world, why still cling to that beggarly nationality of yours?
what are its history and its works weighed with those of Egypt." Then his
voice changed and sank: "I see a man at the edge of the crowd; he is
standing listening there, but he will not obey;" and then with his voice
rising to a cry, "had he obeyed he would never have come down the mountain
carrying in his arms the tables of the Law in the language of the outlaw."

He had been in a linen-draper's shop for a while, had educated himself and
put himself to college, and was now, as a lawyer, famous for hopeless
cases where unsure judgment could not make things worse, and eloquence,
power of cross-examination and learning might amend all. Conversation with
him was always argument, and for an obstinate opponent he had such phrases
as, "have you your head in a bag, sir?" and I seemed his particular
aversion. As with many of the self-made men of that generation, Carlyle
was his chief literary enthusiasm, supporting him, as he believed, in his
contempt for the complexities and refinements he had not found in his hard
life, and I belonged to a generation that had begun to call Carlyle
rhetorician and demagogue. I had once seen what I had believed to be an
enraged bull in a field and had walked up to it as a test of courage to
discover, ju