There are points to be finally settled--clauses to be ultimately fixed--phrases to be polished or pared at the eleventh hour in all human affairs.

Measures finally settled and fixed for weeks before the last hour exist--like all perfection--only in the brains and pages of dramatists and novelists.
[Sidenote: Sunburnt, vigorous, self-possessed.] It was not unnatural under these circumstances that when Mr.Gladstone made his speech introducing the Home Rule Bill there should have been on his cheek a pallor deadlier even than that which usually sits upon his brow.

That pallor, by the way, I heard recently, has been characteristic of him from his earliest years.

A schoolfellow from that far-off and almost pre-historic time when our Grand Old Man was a thin, slim, introspective and prematurely serious boy at Eton, tells to-day that the recollection he has of the young Gladstone is of a slight figure, never running, but always walking with a fast step, with earnest black eyes, and with a pallid face--the ivory pallor, be it observed, not of delicacy, but of robustness.

Still there was on that Home Rule night, a pallor that had the deadlier hue of sleeplessness, worry, over-anxiety--the hideous burden of a great, weighty, and complex speech to deliver.
On April 6th all this was gone.