[Illustration: THE TRIALS OF AN ANXIOUS "JUNIOR."

PROMPTING A DEAF AND TESTY "CHIEF" IN OPEN COURT IS NOT HIS IDEA OF
PERFECT BLISS.]

* * * * *

"DICK" POWER.

When the House of Commons meets in February, it will find many vacant
places. Save, perhaps, on that sacred to the memory of OLD MORALITY,
none will draw towards it such sorrowful glances as the bench below
the Gangway, where, last Session, DICK POWER's smiling face was
found. Everyone in the House knew "DICK," and all liked him--a
modest-mannered, merry-hearted man, whom a strange destiny had not
only dragged into political life, but, as Whip of the Parnellite
Party, had made him the official representative of a body for the most
part socially unknown, and disliked with a fervour happily not often
imported into Parliamentary warfare. DICK POWER, whilst never swerving
by a hair's breadth from loyalty to his colleagues and his leader,
so bore himself that he was welcome in any Parliamentary circle, from
"GOSSET's Room" to the floor of the House, which he sometimes "took"
to deliver a witty speech in support of a Motion for adjourning
over the Derby. He was only in his fortieth year, married scarce a
fortnight, when comes the blind Fury with the abhorrëd shears and
slits the thin-spun thread. "LYCIDAS is dead!"; but he will long be
remembered as shedding through seventeen years a genial light on
Irish politics, too often obscured by aggressive vulgarity, and the
sacrifice of patriotic interests to the ends of personal vanity.