“Here's success to the mission, however its negotiations incline,” said Heffernan, as he drained off his glass and rose to depart. “We shall see you again within ten days or a fortnight, I suppose?” “Oh, certainly; I'll not linger in that wild district an hour longer than I must.” And so, with good night and good wishes, the party separated,--Forester to make his preparations for a journey which, in those days, was looked on as something formidable. CHAPTER II. A TRAVELLING ACQUAINTANCE. Whatever the merits or demerits of the great question, the legislative union between England and Ireland,--and assuredly we have neither the temptation of duty nor inclination to discuss such here,--the means employed by Ministers to carry the measure through Parliament were in the last degree disgraceful. Never was bribery practised with more open effrontery, never did corruption display itself with more daring indifference to public opinion; the Treasury office was an open mart, where votes were purchased, and men sold their country, delighted, as a candid member of the party confessed,--delighted “to have a country to sell.” The ardor of a political career, like the passion for the chase, would seem in its high excitement to still many compunctious murmurings of conscience which in calmer moments could not fail to be heard and acknowledged: the desire to succeed, that ever-present impulse to win, steels the heart against impressions which, under less pressing excitements, had been most painful to endure; and, in this way, honorable and high-minded men have often stooped to acts which, with calmer judgment to guide them, they would have rejected with indignation. Such was Dick Forester's position at the moment. An aide-de-camp on the staff of the Viceroy, a near relative of the Secretary, he was intrusted with many secret and delicate negotiations, affairs in which, had he been a third party, he would have as scrupulously condemned the tempter as the tempted; the active zeal of agency allayed, however, all such qualms of conscience, and every momentary pang of remorse was swallowed up in the ardor for success. Few men will deny in the abstract the cruelty of many field-sports they persist in following; fewer still abandon them on such scruples; and while Forester felt half ashamed to himself of the functions committed to him, he would have been sorely disappointed if he had been passed over in the selection of his relative's political adherents.