"But I should have liked to live to see the Irish question settled."
"You would?" I ejaculated, overwhelmed.
"Yes," he said, adding with a whimsical expression in the wee blue eyes: "You mustn't think I crave for earthly immortality. I use 'settled' in a merely rough sense. My mother was an Irish poetess, over whose songs impetuous Celts still break their hearts and their heads."
I gazed speechless at this wonder-child, pushing the golden locks back from his feverish baby-brow, as if to assure myself by touching him that he was not a phantom.
"Ah, well!" he finished, "it doesn't matter. I have had my day, and mustn't grumble. I scarcely thought, when I witnessed the dissolution of the third Gladstone Government, that I should have lived to see him Premier a fourth time. Three doctors told me I was breaking up fast."
I began to be frightened of this extraordinary infant, divining some wizardry behind the candid little face—some latter-day mystery of re-incarnation, esoteric Buddhism, what-not. The child perceived my perturbation.
"You are thinking I have packed a good deal into my short life," he said, with an amused smile. "And yet some men will make a Gladstone bag hold as much as a portmanteau. Gladstone has done so; and why not I, in my humble degree?"
"True," I answered; "but you cannot begin to pack before you are born."
"You are entirely mistaken," replied the baby, "if you think I have done anything so precocious as that."
"Then you must have lived an odd life," I said, puzzled.