d the banners that awaited him. When animal
spirits were ebullient in him, he regarded his election in the light
of a vulgar practical joke; when the philosophic mood was upon him he
turned from all thought of it as from the smell of a dirty kitchen
coming through a grating.

CHAPTER XI

During the first session Mike was hampered and inconvenienced by the
forms of the House; in the second, he began to weary of its routine.
His wit and paradox attracted some attention; he made one almost
successful speech, many that stirred and stimulated the minds of
celebrated listeners; but for all that he failed. His failure to
redeem the expectations of his friends, produced in him much stress
and pain of mind, the more acute because he was fully alive to the
cause. He ascribed it rightly to certain inherent flaws in his
character. "The world believes in those who believe in it. Such
belief may prove a lack of intelligence on the part of the believer,
but it secures him success, and success is after all the only thing
that compensates for the evil of life."

Always impressed by new ideas, rarely holding to any impression long,
finding all hollow and common very soon, he had been taken with the
importance of the national assembly, but it had hardly passed into
its third session when all illusion had vanished, and Mike ridiculed
parliamentary ambitions in the various chambers of the barristers he
frequented.

It was May-time, and never did the Temple wear a more gracious
aspect. The river was full of hay-boats, the gardens were green with
summer hours. Through the dim sky, above the conical roof of the dear
church, the pigeons fled in rapid quest, and in Garden Court, beneath
the plane-trees, old folk dozed, listening to the rippling tune of
the fountain and the shrilling of the sparrows. In King's Bench Walk
the waving branches were full of their little brown bodies. Sparrows
everywhere, flying from the trees to the eaves, hopping on the golden
gravel, beautifully carpeted with the rich shadows of the
trees--unabashed little birds, scarcely deigning to move out of the
path of the young men as they passed to and fro from their offices to
the library. "That sweet, grave place where we weave our ropes of
sand," so Mike used to speak of it.

The primness of the books, the little galleries guarded by brass
railings, here and there a reading-desk, the sweet silence of the
place, the young men reading at the polished oak tabl