Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/67

 he had no notion of making enemies unnecessarily, he took an early opportunity of telling Mr. Hayter, the Whip of the Opposition, that he would gladly support the Liberal Party whenever he could agree with them. "You are very obliging," rejoined the Whip, "but we want men who will be glad to support the Party when they don't agree with them."

The Irish in London invited me to a public dinner. I suggested that it should be a dinner to the leaders of the Tenant-Right Movement, but they replied that it was not to the advocate of fair land laws nor even to the victor at the New Ross election they proffered the compliment, but to the State prisoner of '44 and '48 and one of the founders of the new literature in Ireland. The committee was one representing all the Irish districts in London, and I was touched to find that the secretary was my early friend Mat Trumble, whom I had lost sight of for a time. The dinner took place, and one of the banners presented is still an ornament in my salon, after nearly half a century. This friendly demonstration introduced me to a man destined to become a life-long friend, Michael O'Grady, the manager of an insurance office, and a man of great practical ability. He accompanied me at a later period to Australia, when he became my constant ally in difficulties and my colleague in office, and his sympathy and services only ended with his life.

Parliament was a focus of new emotions. It was a strange sensation to encounter in one hall of limited extent a crowd of personages familiar to cultivated men wherever civilisation existed. Punch had made many of them immediately recognisable, and some of them I had seen before. The most striking figure in the assembly was its official leader, Mr. Disraeli. In the front benches, crowded with Englishmen, for the most part bright complexioned and always punctiliously fresh in linen and visage, sat a man approaching fifty, with swarthy features and a complexion which had once been olive, on every lineament of which was written foreigner and alien. It was not an uncomely face, and far from unimpressive, but it was conspicuously un-English. Masculine will and unflinching purpose might be read, it seemed to me,