Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/83

 My hostess looked flushed and offended. 'I don't mind your laughing at me/ she said, 'but pray don't laugh at verses which came from the very heart of my husband when we first knew each other; and which I will treasure to my dying day.' I hastened to apologise for my rudeness and got out of the scrape indifferently well."

When Parliament reassembled the Leaguers urged on the appointment of the Select Committee to which the Land Bills were referred. After much negotiation a committee of twentyn-ine members were chosen, half of them being unequivocal landlords, or landlords' friends, and on the other part, Shee, Lucas, Duffy, and Colonel Greville from the League. Mr. Bright and Dr. Phillimore, as amici-curiæ, and other supposed neutrals, including Mr. James Sadleir, brother of the new Lord of the Treasury, and Mr. J. D. Fitzgerald, a future Attorney-General. During this session the labour of the Leaguers was constant and exhausting. When the Select Committee sat they attended the House at noon, and only left it after midnight. Every Catholic or Irish interest in any part of the empire was referred to some of them. In the House they sat among enemies, and faced more dangerous enemies on the other side of it, the representatives of the constituencies supported by the undoubted majority of the Irish bishops. And after their success against Sadleir they had no further success. As the session proceeded, whenever a candidate went to the hustings he was hamstrung from behind by episcopal friends of Dr. Cullen. But the most important deserter from the principles which had carried Crawford's Bill to a second reading was Mr. Crawford himself. He published a letter advising the tenant-farmers to accept and be thankful for a measure more moderate than his Bill. He described the policy by which the Irish Party had won so signal a success in the current session, and described it accurately as a policy of "acting on their pledges." But though two members had just forfeited theirs he was not disposed to complain. He found it impossible to doubt that they would use the position they had obtained to promote public ends. Though we all now know that he might as reasonably have given credit for good intentions to Titus Gates as to John Sadleir, it would be cruel to triumph