word of these contents, which will be delivered
seasonably to the lady chiefly concerned, by the proper person. She
hears this morning I 'm off on a hasty visit to Ireland, as I have been
preparing her of late to expect I must, and yours the blame, if any,
though I will be the last to fling it at you. I meet Father B. and
pretty Kitty before I cross. Judging by the wind this morning, the
passage will furnish good schooling for a spell of the hustings. But if
I am in the nature of things unable to command the waves, trust me for
holding a mob in leash; and they are tolerably alike. My spirits are
up. Now the die is cast. My election to the vacancy must be reckoned
beforehand. I promise you a sounding report from the Kincora Herald.
They will not say of me after that (and read only the speeches reported
in the local paper) "what is the man but an Irish adventurer!" He is
a lover of his country, Philip O'Donnell, and one of millions, we will
hope. And that stigmatic title of long standing, more than anything
earthly, drove him to the step-to the ruin of his domestic felicity
perhaps. But we are past sighing.

'Think you, when he crossed the tide, Caius Julius Caesar sighed?

'No, nor thought of his life, nor his wife, but of the thing to be done.
Laugh, my boy! I know what I am about when I set my mind on a powerful
example. As the chameleon gets his colour, we get our character from the
objects we contemplate...'

Jane glanced over the edge of the letter sheet rosily at Philip.

His dryness in hitting the laughable point diverted her, and her mind
became suffused with a series of pictures of the chameleon captain
planted in view of the Roman to become a copy of him, so that she did
not peruse the terminating lines with her wakefullest attention:

'The liege lady of my heart will be the earliest to hail her hero
triumphant, or cherish him beaten--which is not in the prospect. Let
Ireland be true to Ireland. We will talk of the consolidation of the
Union by and by. You are for that, you say, when certain things are
done; and you are where I leave you, on the highway, though seeming to
go at a funeral pace to certain ceremonies leading to the union of the
two countries in the solidest fashion, to their mutual benefit, after a
shining example. Con sleeps with a corner of the eye open, and you are
not the only soldier who is a strategist, and a tactician too, aware of
when it is best to be out of the way. Now adieu and pax