unnecessary, for the Old Man was able to read his notes without the
smallest difficulty; and the speech had come to a conclusion long before
the hour when the deepening shadows make it hard to read by the light
from the glass roof of the House.

[Sidenote: The peroration.]

At last, the latest details had been given; the Old Man approached his
peroration. By this time the voice had sunk in parts to a low whisper,
and the deathly hue of the beautiful face had grown deeper. There was
something that almost inspired awe as one looked at that strange,
curious, solitary figure in the growing darkness. The intense strain on
the House had finally exhausted it, and there had come a silence that
had in it the solemnity, the strange stillness, the rapt emotion of
some sublime service in a great cathedral rather than the beginning of
one of the fiercest and most rancorous party conflicts of our time. To
this mood Mr. Gladstone attuned the closing words of his speech. The
words came slowly, quietly, gently, sinking at times almost to a
whisper. What fantasies could not one's mind play as one listened to
these words. There was underneath the language, the looks, the voice,
the tragic thought that this was a message rather from the shadow-land
beyond the grave than from this rough, noisy, material world. Imagine
yourself in a country church, the sole visitor in the ghostly silence
and the solemn twilight, with spectres all around you in the memorials
of the dead and memories of the living, and then fancy the organist
silently stealing, also alone, to the organ, and giving out to the
evening air some beautifully solemn anthem with all the sadness of
death, and none of the exultant joy of resurrection, and then you will
get some faint idea of the pent-up emotion which filled every
sympathetic heart in the great assembly as the Old Man finally came to