[Sidenote: Watchers for the dawn.]

As a result of all this, there occurred in the House on Tuesday morning,
January 31st, a scene unparalleled since the famous day when Mr.
Gladstone brought in his Home Rule Bill in 1886. Night was still
fighting the hosts of advancing morn, when a Tory Member--Mr.
Seton-Karr--approached the closed doors of the House of Commons, and
demanded admission to a seat. For nearly an hour he was left alone with
the darkness, and the ghosts of dead statesmen and forgotten scenes of
oratory, passion, and triumph. But as six o'clock was striking, there
entered the yard around the House two figures--similar in
purpose--different in appearance. Mr. Johnson, of Ballykilbeg, is by
this time one of the familiar types of the House; and, from his evident
sincerity, is, in spite of the terrible and mediæval narrowness of his
creed, personally popular. Mr. Johnson is an Orangeman of Orangemen. Now
and then he delivers a speech, in which he declares that rather than see
Home Rule in Ireland, he and his friends will line the ditches with
riflemen. The Pope disturbs his dreams by night and stalks across his
speeches by day; and there is a general impression about him that he is
resolved, some time or other, to walk through a good large stream of
Papist blood. He is also a violent teetotaller; and is so strong on this
point that he is ready to shake hands, even with the deadliest Irish
opponent, across the back of a Sunday Closing Bill. Like most
Parliamentary fire-eaters, he is a mild-mannered man. Time hath dealt
tenderly with him. But still he is well on to the seventies: his hair,
once belligerently red, is thin and streaked with grey; and he walks
somewhat slowly, and not very vigorously. Dr. Rentoul is a man of a
different type. What Johnson feels, Rentoul affects. He is a tall,
common-looking, heavily-built, blustering kind of fellow; great, it is
said, on the abusive Tory platform, almost dumb and utterly impotent in