Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/48

 of the famous hotel, in proposing a candidate referred to these amenities, and observed that a stranger might suppose such a critic, like Hamlet's father, was endowed with Hyperion curls and the front of Jove himself, instead of a wrinkled brow and a scratch wig. For himself he would not be unwilling to compete with the demagogue before a jury of ladies if they could only see him as nature made him without the aid of the barber. This sally was received with roars of applause, but before they concluded O'Connell strode to the front of the platform, snatched off his wig, and, pointing to his naked head covered with a stubble of grey hair, cried, "Ladies, I demand your instant judgment." The laughter was universal, and he had the best of the encounter; but at a price I thought the National leader ought not to have paid for it.

Coffey, who was a handsome, gentlemanly young fellow, very careful of his dress and appearance, was the cadet of the reporters; the doyen was Christy Hughes, a cheerful, friendly old man, always shabbily dressed, and of almost repulsive ugliness; his mouth being disfigured by projecting teeth, and his cheeks the colour of beetroot. One of his colleagues, in the frank simplicity of Bohemian intercourse, described his head as "a Beotian Temple with a 'Tusk-an' pediment." There were pleasant stories of his adventures floating about among his comrades. In the parliamentary recess O'Connell used to attend Charity Dinners and make a speech on philanthropy and brotherly love which did service repeatedly in the same cause. One year Christy Hughes, having relished the good things at a dinner too keenly, lost his note-book containing the report of O'Connell's speech; but after a little bewilderment he made good the deficiency by turning back to the speech of the previous year, cutting it out of the file of the Freeman and republishing it; and nobody, it was said, discovered the substitution, not even O'Connell himself.

Of the current stories of that day I will recall only one. There was a good-looking, clever scamp, an Englishman, named H, connected with Irish journalism at this time. He had been a reporter in Dublin, but suddenly left town to conduct a new journal in Galway. After a year he reappeared in his old haunts. "What brings you here?" one of his acquaintances demanded; "are you not editor