ing;--yes, one thing was his for
evermore,--Ennui.

Thoughts and visions rose into consciousness like monsters coming
through a gulf of dim sea-water; all delusion had fallen, and he saw
the truth in all its fearsome deformity. On awakening, the implacable
externality of things pressed upon his sight until he felt he knew
what the mad feel, and then it seemed impossible to begin another
day. With long rides, with physical fatigue, he strove to keep at bay
the despair-fiend which now had not left him hardly for weeks. For
long weeks the disease continued, almost without an intermission; he
felt sure that death was the only solution, and he considered the
means for encompassing the end with a calm that startled him.

Nor was it until the spring months that he found any subjects that
might take him out of his melancholy, and darken the too acute
consciousness of the truth of things which was forcing him on to
madness or suicide. One day it was suggested that he should stand for
Parliament. He eagerly seized the idea, and his brain thronged
immediately with visions of political successes, of the parliamentary
triumphs he would achieve. Bah! he was an actor at heart, and
required the contagion of the multitude, and again he looked out upon
life with visionary eyes. Harsh hours fell behind him, gay hours
awaited him, held hands to him.

Men wander far from the parent plot of earth; but a strange fatality
leads them back, they know not how. None had desired to separate from
all associations of early life more than Mike, and he was at once
glad and sorry to find that the door through which he was to enter
Parliament was Cashel. He would have liked better to represent an
English town or county, but he could taste in Cashel a triumph which
he could nowhere else in the world. To return triumphant to his
native village is the secret of every wanderer's desire, for there he
can claim not only their applause but their gratitude.

The politics he would have to adopt made him wince, for he knew the
platitudes they entailed; and in preference he thought of the
paradoxes with which he would stupefy the House, the daring and
originality he would show in introducing subjects that, till then, no
one had dared to touch upon. With the politics of his party he had
little intention of concerning himself, for his projects were to make
for himself a reputation as an orator, and having confirmed it to
seek another constituency at the close of