An Irish Crazy-Quilt.

SMILES AND TEARS, WOVEN INTO SONG AND STORY.
BY
ARTHUR M. FORRESTER.
BOSTON:
ALFRED MUDGE & SON PRINTERS, 24 FRANKLIN STREET.
1891.

Copyright,
1890,
By ARTHUR M. FORRESTER.

TO THE
“FELONS” OF IRELAND,
THE BRAVE AND FAITHFUL FEW,
Who have been Exiled or Imprisoned or Executed
Because they Loved their Native Land more than
Home or Liberty or Life,
This Volume
IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR.

CONTENTS.

AN IRISH CRAZY-QUILT.

THE CHURCH OF BALLYMORE.

I HAVE knelt in great cathedrals with their wondrous naves and aisles,
Whose fairy arches blend and interlace,
Where the sunlight on the paintings like a ray of glory smiles,
And the shadows seem to sanctify the place;
Where the organ’s tones, like echoes of an angel’s trumpet roll,
Wafted down by seraph wings from heaven’s shore—
They are mighty and majestic, but they cannot touch my soul
Like the little whitewashed church of Ballymore.

Ah! modest little chapel, half-embowered in the trees,
Though the roof above its worshippers was low,
And the earth bore traces sometimes of the congregation’s knees,
While they themselves were bent with toil and woe!
Milan, Cologne, St. Peter’s—by the feet of monarchs trod—
With their monumental genius and their lore,
Never knew in their magnificence more trustful prayers to God
Than ascended to His throne from Ballymore!

Its priest was plain and simple, and he scorned to hide his brogue
In accents that we might not understand,
But there was not in the parish such a renegade or rogue
As to think his words not heaven’s own command!
He seemed our cares and troubles and our sorrows to divide,
And he never passed the poorest peasant’s door—
In sickness he was with us, and in death still by our side—
God be with you, Father Tom, of Ballymore.

There’s a green graveyard behind it, and in dreams at night I see
Each little modest slab and grassy mound;
For my gentle mother’s sleeping ’neath the withered rowan tree,
And a host of kindly neighbors lie around!
The famine and the fever through our stricken country spread,
Desolation was about me, sad and sore,
So I had to cross the waters, in strange lands to seek my bread,
But I left my heart behind in Ballymore!

I am proud of our cathedrals—they are emblems of our love
To an ever-mighty Benefactor shown;
And when wealth and art and beauty have been given from above,
The devil should not have them as his own!
Their splendor has inspired me—but amidst it all I prayed
God to grant me, when life’s weary work is o’er,
Sweet rest beside my mother in the dear embracing shade
Of the little whitewashed church of Ballymore!

THE OLD BOREEN.

EMBROIDERED with shamrocks and spangled with daisies,
Tall foxgloves like sentinels guarding the way,
The squirrel and hare played bo-peep in its mazes,
The green hedgerows wooed it with odorous spray;
The thrush and the linnet piped overtures in it,
The sun’s golden rays bathed its bosom of green.
Bright scenes, fairest skies, pall to-day on my eyes,
For I opened them first on an Irish boreen!

It flung o’er my boyhood its beauty and gladness,
Rich homage of perfume and color it paid;
It laughed with my joy—in my moments of sadness
What solace I found in its pitying shade.
When Love, to my rapture, rejoiced in my capture,
My fetters the curls of a brown-haired colleen,
What draught from his chalice, in mansion or palace,
So sweet as I quaffed in the dear old boreen?

But green fields were blighted and fair skies beclouded,
Stern frost and harsh rain mocked the poor peasant’s toil,
Ere they burst into blossom the buds were enshrouded,
The seed ere its birth crushed in merciless soil;
Wild tempests struck blindly, the landlord, less kindly,
Aimed straight at our hearts with a “death sentence” keen;
The blast spared our sheeling, which he, more unfeeling,
Left roofless and bare to affright the boreen.

A dirge of farewell through the hawthorn was pealing,
The wind seemed to stir branch and leaf with a sigh,
As, down on a tear-bedewed shamrock sod kneeling,
I kissed the old boreen a weeping good-by;
And vowed that should ever my patient endeavor
The grains of success from life’s harvest-field glean,
Where’er fortune found me, whatever ties bound me,
My eyes should be closed in the dear old boreen.

Ah! Fate has been cruel, in toil’s endless duel
With sickness and want I have earned only scars;
Life’s twilight is nearing—its day disappearing—
My weary soul sighs to escape through its bars;
But ere fields elysian shall dazzle its vision,
Grant, Heaven, that its flight may be winged through the scene
Of streamlet and wild-wood, the home of my childhood,
The grave of my kin, and the dear old boreen!

AN IRISH SCHOOLHOUSE.

UPON the rugged ladder rungs—whose pinnacle is Fame—
How often have ambitious pens deep graven Harvard’s name;
The gates of glory Cambridge men o’er all the world assail,
And rulers in the realm of thought look back with pride to Yale.
To no such Alma Mater can my Muse in triumph raise
Its Irish voice in canticles of gratitude and praise;
Yet still I hold in shrine of gold, and until death I will,
The little schoolhouse, thatched with straw, that lay behind the hill.

When in the balmy morning, racing down the green boreen
Toward its portal, ivy-framed, our curly heads were seen,
We felt no shame for ragged coats, nor blushed for shoeless feet,
But bubbled o’er with laughter dear old master’s smile to meet;
Yet saw beneath his homespun garb an awe-inspiring store
Of learning’s fearful mysteries and academic lore.
No monarch wielded sceptre half so potent as his quill
In that old schoolhouse, thatched with straw, that lay behind the hill.

Perhaps—and yet ’tis hard to think—our boastful modern school
Might feel contempt for master, for his methods and his rule;
Would scorn his simple ways—and in the rapid march of mind
His patient face and thin gray locks would lag far, far behind.
No matter; he was all to us, our guide and mentor then;
He taught us how to face life’s fight with all the grit of men;
To honor truth, and love the right, and in the future fill
Our places in the world as he had done behind the hill.

He taught us, too, of Ireland’s past; her glories and her wrongs—
Our lessons being varied with the most seditious songs:
We were quite a nest of rebels, and with boyish fervor flung
Our hearts into the chorus of rebellion when we sung.
In truth, this was the lesson, above all, we conned so well
That some pursued the study in the English prison cell,
And others had to cross the seas in curious haste, but still
All living love to-day, as then, the school behind the hill.

The wind blows through the thatchless roof in stormy gusts to-day;
Around its walls young foxes now, in place of children, play;
The hush of desolation broods o’er all the country-side;
The pupils and their kith and kin are scattered far and wide.
But wheresoe’er one scholar on the face of earth may roam,
When in a gush of tears comes back the memory of home,
He finds the brightest picture limned by Fancy’s magic skill,
The little schoolhouse, thatched with straw, that lay behind the hill.

PAT MURPHY’S COWS.

[In one of the debates on the Irish land question, Chief Secretary Forster endeavored to attribute much of the poverty in Ireland to the early and imprudent marriages of the peasantry, and elicited roars of laughter by a comic but cruel description of one Pat Murphy, who had only two cows, but was the happy father of no less than eleven children.]

IN a vale in Tipperary, where the silvery Anner flows,
There’s a farm of but two acres where Pat Murphy ploughs and sows;
From rosy morn till ruddy eve he toils with sinews strong,
With hope alone for dinner, and for lunch an Irish song.
He’s a rood laid out for cabbage, and another rood for corn,
And another sweet half-acre pratie blossoms will adorn;
While down there in the meadow, fat and sleek and healthy, browse
Pat’s mine of wealth, his fortune sole—a pair of Kerry cows.

Ah, black were the disaster if poor Pat should ever lose
The cows whose milk and butter buy eleven young Murphys shoes,
Which keep their shirts upon their backs, the quilt upon the bed,
And help to thatch the dear old roof that shelters overhead.
And even then the blessings that they bring are scarcely spent,
For they help brave Murphy often in his troubles with the rent;
In bitterest hours their friendly low his spirits can arouse;
He don’t mind eleven young Murphys while he’s got that pair of cows.

And when the day is over, and the cows are in the byre,
Pat Murphy sits contented with his dhudeen by the fire;
His children swarm around him, and they hang about his chair—
The twins perched on his shoulders with their fingers in his hair,
Till Bridget, cosey woman, takes the youngest one to rest,
Lays four to sleep beneath the stairs, a couple in the chest;
And happy Phaudrig Murphy in his big heart utters vows
Ere that eleven should be ten he’d sell the pair of cows.

Then in the morning early, ere Pat, whistling, ventures out,
How they cluster all around him there with joyous laugh and shout!
A kiss for one, a kiss for all, ’tis quite a morning’s task,
And the twins demand an extra share, and must have what they ask.
What if a gloomy thought his spirit’s brightness should obscure,
As he feels age creeping on him with soft footsteps, slow but sure,
He’s hardly o’er the threshold when the shadow leaves his brow,
For his eldest girl and Bridget each is milking a fine cow.

Let us greet the name of cruel Buckshot Forster with a groan—
He hadn’t got the decency to leave those cows alone;
He thought maternal virtue only fitting for a sneer,
And made Pat Murphy’s little ones the subject of a jeer.
Well, the people have more feeling than the knaves who make their laws,
And when the people laugh ’tis for a somewhat better cause:
They hate the whining coward who beneath life’s burden bows,
But they honor men like Murphy, with his pair of Kerry cows.

FATHER TOM MALONE.
A LAND LEAGUE REMINISCENCE.

HAIR white as innocence, that crowned
A gentle face which never frowned;
Brow smooth, spite years of care and stress;
Lips framed to counsel and to bless;
Deep, thoughtful, tender, pitying eyes,
A reflex of our native skies,
Through which now tears, now sunshine shone—
There you have Father Tom Malone.

He bade the infant at its birth
Cead mille failthe to the earth;
With friendly hand he guided youth
Along the thorny track of truth;
The dying felt, yet knew not why,
Nearer to Heaven when he was by—
For, sure, the angels at God’s throne
Were friends of Father Tom Malone.

For us, poor simple sons of toil
Who wrestled with a stubborn soil,
Our one ambition, sole content,
Not to be backward with the rent;
Our one absorbing, constant fear,
The agent’s visits twice a year;
We had, our hardships to atone,
The love of Father Tom Malone.

One season failed. The dull earth slept.
Despite of ceaseless vigil kept
For sign of crop, day after day,
To coax it from the sullen clay,
Nor oats, nor rye, nor barley came;
The tubers rotted—then, oh, shame!
We—’twas the last time ever known—
Lost faith in Father Tom Malone.

We had, from fruitful years before,
Garnered with care a frugal store;
’Twould pay one gale, but when ’twas gone
What were our babes to live upon?
We had no seed for coming spring,
Nor faintest hope to which to cling;
We would have starved without a moan,
When out spoke Father Tom Malone.

His voice, so flute-like in the past,
Now thrilled us like a bugle blast,
His eyes, so dove-like in their gaze,
Took a new hue, and seemed to blaze!
“God’s wondrous love doth not intend
Hundreds to starve that one may spend;
Pay ye no rent, but hold your own.”
That from mild Father Tom Malone.

And when the landlord with a force
Of English soldiers, foot and horse,
Came down and direst vengeance swore,
Who met him at the cabin door?
Who reasoned first and then defied
The thief in all his power and pride?
Who won the poor man’s fight alone?
Why, fearless Father Tom Malone.

So, when you point to heroes’ scars,
And boast their prowess in the wars,
Give one small meed of praise, at least,
To this poor modest Irish priest.
No laurel wreath was twined for him,
But pulses throb and eyelids dim
When toil-worn peasants pray, “Mavrone,
God bless you, Father Tom Malone!”

YOU CAN GUESS.

THERE are grottos in Wicklow, and groves in Kildare,
And the loveliest glens robed with shamrock in Clare,
And in fairy Killarney ’tis easy to find
Sweet retreats where a swain can unburden his mind;
But of all the dear spots in our emerald isle,
Where verdure and sunshine crown life with a smile,
There’s one boreen I love, for ’twas there I confess
I first met my fate,—what it was you can guess.

It was under the shade of its bordering trees,
One day I grew suddenly weak at the knees
At the thought of what seemed quite a terrible task,
And yet it was but a short question to ask.
’Twas over, and since, night and morning, I bless
The boreen that heard the soft whisper of “yes.”
And the breezes that toyed with each clustering tress;
And the question was this—but I’m sure you can guess.

ONLY!

ONLY a cabin, thatched and gray,
Only a rose-twined door,
Only a barefooted child at play
On only an earthern floor.
Only a little brain—not wise
For even a head so small,
And that is the reason he bitterly cries
For leaving his home—that’s all.

Only the thought of her girlhood there,
And her happier days as wife,
In the shelter poor of its walls so bare,
Have endeared them to her for life;
What is the weeping woman’s cause?
Why are her accents gall?
What does she know of our intricate laws?
It was only a hut—that’s all.

He’s only a peasant in blood and birth,
That man with the eyelids dim,
And there’s room enough on the wide, wide earth
For sinewy serfs like him.
Why had this pitiful, narrow farm,
For his heart such a wondrous thrall?
Why each tree and flower such a mystic charm?
He was born in the place—that’s all.

. . . . . . .

The years have gone, and the worn-out pair
Sleep under the stranger’s clay,
And the weeping child with the curly hair
Is a brave, strong man to-day;
Yet still he thinks of the olden land,
And prays for her tyrant’s fall,
And longs to be one of some chosen band,
With only a chance—that’s all.

SONGS OF INNISFAIL.

WHERE the Austral river rushes
Through feathery heath and bushes,
Through its gurgles and its gushes
You may hear,
To your wonder and surprise,
Sweet melodies arise
You have heard ’neath other skies
Low and clear.
Yes! within the gold land,
Strange to you and cold land,
Voices from the old land
Swell upon the gale—
Lyrics of the story,
Lit with flames of glory,
Dimmed with pages gory,
Songs of Innisfail!

Where Mississippi leaping
O’er cliffs and crags, or creeping
Through valleys fair, is sweeping
To the sea,
From the fields of nodding grain
On some mountain path or plain
Rings a stirring old refrain
Fresh and free.
Yes! where’er we wander
Irish hearts will ponder
O’er our land, and fonder
Throb with ev’ry tale
Of the home that bore us,
Till the new skies o’er us
Echo with our chorus
Songs of Innisfail.

Exiles o’er the spray-foam,
Whereso’er we may roam,
Thoughts of far-away home
Linger still,
And in dreams we see again
Babbling stream and silent glen,
Forest green and lonely fen,
Vale and hill.
Yes! our hearts’ devotion
Flies across the ocean,
While with deep emotion
Sternest features pale,
As around us stealing,
Softened by sad feeling,
Through the air are pealing
Songs of Innisfail!

TAMING A TIGER.

WE were standing together on the platform of the King’s Bridge terminus, Dublin,—five of us—a gallant quintette in the noble army of drummers.

There was Austin Burke, slim, prim, and demure, as befitted the representative of a vast dry-goods establishment whose business lay amongst modistes and milliners; Paul Ryan, tall, dark, and dignified, who travelled for the great ironmongery firm of Locke & Brassey; Tim Malone, smart, chatty, and well-informed, the agent of a flourishing stationery house; dashing Jack Hickey, who was solicitor for a distillery, and rattling, rakish, as packed with funny ideas and comical jokes as a Western newspaper, and as full of mischief as a frolicsome kitten; and lastly, myself. We were waiting for the 11.30 A.M. train south, and indulging in somewhat personal witticisms upon the appearance of various personages in the surrounding crowd, when our attention was attracted by the bustling advent upon the platform of a fussy, florid individual, with a face like an inflamed tomato, and the generally irascible and angry air of an infuriated rooster.

“Know that fellow?” queried Burke. “That’s Major Boomerang, the newly-appointed Resident Magistrate for some part of Cork; all the way from Bengal, to teach the wild Irish Hindoo civilization. He thinks we’re all Thugs and Dacoits, and by the ‘jumping Harry,’ as he would ejaculate, he’s going to sit on us. What do you say, boys, if we have a little lark with him? Let us all get into the same carriage and draw him out. I’ll introduce you, F. (to me), as my friend Captain Neville, of the Galway militia. I won’t know you other fellows, but you can take whatever characters you like, just as the conversation turns. Let me see. You, Ryan, get out at Portarlington, and you, Malone, at Limerick Junction. Jack Hickey goes on with us to Mallow. Now, I know this Boomerang will be launching out into fiery denunciation of Parnell and Biggar and all the rest before we’re aboard ten minutes, and I want each of you fellows to take the role of whoever he pitches into the worst, and challenge him in that character. D’ye see? F., as Capt. Neville, will offer to do the amiable for the major, and persuade him that he must fight. He’s an awful fire-eater in conversation, but I’ll stake my sample case we’ll put him into the bluest of funks before we part. What do you say, boys?”

Of course, we agreed. Whoever heard of a drummer refusing to take a hand in any deviltry afoot that promised a laugh at the end? We watched the major into a first-class carriage, and quietly followed him. He seemed rather inclined to resent our intrusion, for we just crowded the compartment, but he graciously recognized Burke, who had stayed in Dublin at the same hotel, and he was “delighted, sir, by the jumping Harry,—delighted to meet a brother officer” (that was your humble servant).

At first he was somewhat reticent about Irish matters. He told us all manner of thrilling stories of his Indian adventures. He had polished off a few hundred tigers with all sorts of weapons, transfixed them to the trunks of trees with the native spear, riddled them with buckshot, swan-shot and bullets, and on one occasion, when his stock of lead had pegged out, and a Royal Bengal tiger, twelve feet, sir, from his snout to the tip of his tail, was crouched ready to spring on poor Joe Boomerang, why, Joe whipped out a loose double tooth, rammed it home, and sent it crashing through the brute’s frontal ossicles.

He wanted to keep that tooth as a memento, but, by the jumping Harry! the Maharajah of Jubbulpore would take no denial, and that tooth is now the brightest jewel in the dusky prince’s coronet.

He had killed a panther with his naked hands—with one naked hand, in fact. It had leaped upon him with its mouth wide open, and in desperation he had thrust his arm down its throat, intending to tear its tongue out by the roots. But such was the momentum of the panther’s spring and his own thrust, that his arm went in up to the shoulder, and he found his strong right hand groping around the beast’s interior recesses. He tore its heart out, sir,—its heart,—and an assortment of lungs and ribs and other things.

He used to think no more of waking up with a deadly cobra-di-capello crawling up his leg, or a boa constrictor playfully entwining around his waist, than he did of taking his rice pillau or his customary curry. He never lost his presence of mind, by the jumping Harry, not he.

At last, as we were passing through the pleasant pasturage of Kildare, and rapidly nearing Portarlington, where we should part with Ryan, we managed to turn the conversation upon the unsettled state of affairs in Ireland.

“Ah!” said the blusterous Boomerang, “I’m going to change all that—down in Cork, anyhow. I’ll have the murderous scoundrels like mice in a fortnight. By the jumping Harry, I’ll settle ’em! I’ve quelled twenty-seven mutinies and blown four hundred tawny rascals to pulverized atoms in Bengal, and if I don’t make these marauding peasants here sing dumb, my name’s not Boomerang—Joe Boomerang, the terror of Janpore.”

“I don’t,” observed Burke, with a wink at Ryan, “I don’t blame the peasantry so much as those who are leading them astray. There’s Davitt, for instance.”

“I wish,” growled the major, “that I had that rapscallion within reach of my horsewhip, sir, for five minutes. I’d flay him,—flay him alive, sir. If he ever is fool enough to come in my direction, he’ll remember Joe Boomerang—fighting Joe—as long as he lives. Green snakes and wild elephants! I would annihilate the released convict, the pardoned thief, the—the—by the jumping Harry, sir, I would exterminate the wretch!”

Ryan slowly rose, stretched his long form to its uttermost dimensions, and leaning over to the astounded major, in a deep base thundered, “I am the man, Major Boomerang, at your service. I have listened to your abominable bombast in silent contempt as long as I was not personally concerned. Now that you have attacked me, I demand satisfaction. I suppose your friend, Capt. Neville, will act for you. Captain, you will oblige me with your card. My second shall wait upon you to-morrow. As an officer, even though no gentleman, you cannot disgrace the uniform you have worn, Major Boomerang, by refusing to meet me. Good day.”

We had reached Portarlington, and Ryan leaped lightly on to the platform and disappeared, leaving the major puffing and blowing and gasping like an exhausted porpoise. “By the jumping Harry!” he at last exclaimed, but his voice had changed from its bouncing barytone to a timorous tenor, “I cannot fight a convicted thief. I won’t! D—— me, if I will!”

“I beg your pardon, major,” I observed. “You are mistaken; Davitt is not a thief. He was merely a political prisoner. You can meet him with perfect propriety. I shall be happy to arrange the preliminaries for you. I expect he’ll choose pistols. Let me see, Burke, wasn’t it with pistols he met poor Col. Smith? Ah, yes, to be sure it was. He shot him in the left groin. Don’t you remember what a job they had extracting the bullet? People said, you know, that it was the doctors and not Davitt that killed him.” Burke assented with a nod.

The major gazed at us with a sort of dazed, bewildered look, like a man in a dream. “Good God!” he murmured at last; “has he killed a man already? Why didn’t they arrest him? Why didn’t they hang him? I’m not going to be killed—I mean to kill a man that should be hanged. I’m not going to be popped at by a fellow that goes about shooting colonels as if they were snipe.”

“But, my dear major,” I remonstrated, “you must uphold the traditions of the cloth. In fact, the government will expect you to act just as Smith did.” (The major groaned.) “Smith didn’t like the idea of meeting Davitt, he’s such a dead shot.” (The major’s visage became positively blue.) “But the Duke of Cambridge wrote to him that he must go out for the honor of the service.”

“The service be d——d!” exploded the major, over whose countenance a kaleidoscope of colors—red, purple, blue, yellow, and white—were flashing and fluctuating; “I shall not fight a common low fellow like this. Now, if I had been challenged by a gentleman, it would be a different matter. By the jumping Harry, sir!” he cried, as he felt his courage returning at the prospect of evading the encounter, “if, instead of that low-bred cur, one of those Irish popinjays in Parliament had ventured to beard the lion heart of Boomerang, I should have sprung, sir, sprung hilariously at the chance. But there isn’t a man among them that wouldn’t quail at a glance from me, sir; yes, a lightning glance from fighting Joe, who has looked the Bengal tiger in the eyes and winked at the treacherous crocodile. Parnell is a coward, sir! Biggar and O’Donnell would hide if they heard that blazing Boomerang was round; and as for that whipper-snapper Healy, why, sir, I could tear him limb from limb, without exerting my mighty muscles.”

Little Tim Malone sprang to his feet like an electrified bantam-cock, and shaking his fist right under the major’s nose, he hissed: “You are a cur; an unmitigated, red-eyed, yellow-skinned, mongrel cur. I am Healy. I’ll have your life’s gore for this, if you escape my friend Davitt. I shall request him as a favor only to chip off one of your ears, so that I may have the pleasure of scarifying your hide. Captain Neville, as you must act for your brother officer, I shall send a friend to you to-morrow.” He sat down, and a solemn silence fell upon the company. The prismatic changes of hue which had illuminated the major’s features had disappeared altogether, and his face was now a sickening whitey-yellow. Not a word was spoken until we reached Limerick Junction, where Malone got off. The gallant Boomerang recovered a little at this, and managed to whisper to me, “Can Healy fight?”

“He is a master of fence,” I replied. “I suppose, as the insulted party, he will demand choice of weapons. His weapon is the sword; at least, he has always chosen that so far.”

“Has he been out before?” asked the terrible tiger-slayer, in such horror-stricken accents that I could barely refrain from laughing outright.

“Oh, yes,” I replied carelessly, “five or six times.”

“Has he—has he—I’m not afraid, you know—ha! ha! Joe Boomerang afraid—capital joke—but—but—has he killed anybody?”

“Only poor Lieutenant Jones,” I answered. “You see Jones insulted him personally; his other duels originated in political, not personal, matters. I think,” I added maliciously, “he’ll try to kill you.” The major gurgled as if he had a spasm of some sort in his windpipe. I continued: “I would advise you to furbish up your knowledge of both pistol and sword practice. You’ll have to fight both Davitt and Healy. You’ll be dismissed and disgraced if you decline either challenge. It will be somewhat inconvenient for me to see you through both affairs, but, my dear fellow, I never allow personal inconvenience to interfere with my duty.”

“You’re very good,” he murmured; “but don’t you think that—that—”

“That I may only be wanted for one. Very likely, but let us hope for the best. I know an undertaker in Cork—a decent sort of a chap. We can arrange for the funeral with him, so that, if it don’t come off the first time, he won’t charge anything extra for waiting till Healy kills you.”

“Stop, stop,” screamed the agonized panther pulverizer. “You make me sick.” By this time he had become green, and, as I did not know what alarming combination of colors he might next assume if I continued, I remained silent for some time. As we were nearing Mallow the major managed to get hold of enough of his voice to inquire how it came to pass that the government permitted such a barbarous practice as duelling.

“Well,” I responded, “it’s a re-importation from America. Western institutions are getting quite a hold here. Duelling is winked at in deference to Yankee ideas.”

“Curse America and the Yankees too,” roared Boomerang. “Only for them we would have peace and quiet. They are a pestiferous, rowdy, hellish gang of—”

“Yahoop!” There was a yell from Jack Hickey that shook the roof of the car, as that individual bounded to his feet with a large clasp-knife clutched in his sinewy hand, and a desperate look of fiendish determination on his features that made the mighty Indian hunter collapse and curl up in his corner like a lame hen in a heavy shower. “Where’s the double-distilled essence of the son of a cross-eyed galoot that opens his measly mouth to drop filth and slime about our great and glorious take-it-all-round scrumptious and everlasting republic of America? I’m Yankee, clean grit, from the toe-nails and finger-tips to the backbone, and he’s riz my dander. And when my dander’s riz, I’m bound to have scalps. I’m a roaring, ring-tailed roysterer from the Rocky Mountains, I am; half earthquake and half wildcat, and when I squeal, somebody’s got to creep into a hole! Yahoop! Let me at the blue-moulded skunk till I rip him open. I don’t wait for any ceremonies, sending seconds and all that bosh. I go red-hot, boiling over, like a Kansas cyclone or a Texas steer, straight for the snub-nosed, curly-toothed, red-headed, all-fired Britisher that wakes my lurid fury. Look out, Boomerang. Draw yer knife, for here’s a double-clawed hyena from Colorado going to skiver you.” And Jack made a terrific plunge forward, while he flashed his knife in a hundred wild gyrations that seemed to light up the compartment with gleaming steel. Burke and I made a pretence of throwing ourselves between the mad Yankee and his victim, but it was unnecessary. The hero of Bengal had fainted.

When we got out at Mallow I tipped one of the porters a shilling, told him that a passenger was ill in a compartment which I pointed out, and, having given him the name of the hotel at which the major purposed staying, I requested the porter to inform Boomerang when he recovered that Captain Neville would wait upon him in the morning to arrange for his interview with three, not two, gentlemen. Later on, when I called at the depot to see after my luggage, I questioned the porter as to Boomerang, and asked had he gone on to his hotel.

“Lor bless you, no, sir,” said the railway official. “As soon as that gintleman kem to, he jist axed what time the first thrain wint on to Cork in the mornin’, an’ thin, whin I towld about you wantin’ to see him this evenin’, he wuddent wait, sorra a bit, for the mornin’, but he booked straight back to Dublin on the thrain that was goin’ there an’ thin. I will say I niver saw such a frightened lookin’ gintleman since the day Squire Mulroony saw Biddy Mullen’s ghost, that hanged herself at the ould cross roads.” A few days after I read this announcement in the Dublin Gazette: “In consequence of ill-health, super-induced by the humid atmosphere of Ireland, Major Boomerang has resigned the resident magistracy in Cork to which he was recently appointed, and will shortly return to Bengal.”

THE LORD OF KENMARE.

THERE are skeleton homes like gaunt ghosts in the valley;
The hillside swarms thick with anonymous graves,
When the Last Trumpet sounds spectral legions ’twill rally,
Whose corpses are shrouded in ocean’s sad waves.
What hosts of accusers will cluster around him,
What cohorts of famine, of wrong, and despair,
On the white Day of Judgment to blanch and confound him,
That stone-hearted, merciless Lord of Kenmare!

Fond, simple, and trusting, we toiled night and morning
The bountiful prizes of Nature to win,
While he, wild and lustful, God’s providence scorning,
Used virtue’s reward as the guerdon of sin,
Till Heaven, in just anger, rained down on the meadow
Distemper and rot; plagued the soil and the air;
Filled the earth with distress, dimmed the sunlight in shadow,
But touched not that cancerous heart in Kenmare!

When God had been good he reaped all of his bounty;
When Heaven was wrathful the burden was ours,
For the terms of this Lord of Kenmare with the county
Were—the thorns for his serfs, for his harlots the flowers.
And when the poor toiler, beneath his load reeling,
Sank, breathless and faint, on his cabin floor bare,
The noose for his cattle, the torch for his sheeling,
Were the pity he found from the Lord of Kenmare.

Our fortune enriched him: he coined our disaster—
This lord of our sinews, our houses, our grounds,
Who felt himself monarch, and knew himself master—
A monarch of slaves, and a master of hounds!
He held not his hand, and he spared not his scourges;
He laughed at the shriek, and he scoffed at the prayer
That Kerry’s green swards and Atlantic’s white surges
Sobbed and wailed, sighed and moaned, ’gainst the Lord of Kenmare!

He has gone from the orgies where once he held revel,
Age and youth hunts no more as legitimate game,
But Ireland to-day finds the work of the devil
Still essayed by an imp of his lineage and name.
Tried only, thank God, for the serf has gained reason,
The fool learned to think, and the coward to dare,
And no longer the wolf-cry of “danger” and “treason”
Wraps in mist the misdeeds of the lords of Kenmare.

Hope’s phosphorent rays light that desolate valley;
Truth’s sunbeams illumine those derelict graves;
The stern blast of Justice’s bugle will rally
Avengers for every corpse ’neath the waves.
Two hemispheres judge as a pitiless jury,
Nor culprit nor crime will their firm verdict spare,
Oh, vain your derision and wasted your fury,
The world writes your sentence, false Lord of Kenmare!

RYAN’S REVENGE.

DURING the height of the land agitation in Ireland, some of the most exciting debates in the House of Commons, and some of the most vehement articles in the National press, had reference to the action of the post-office authorities in opening letters addressed to gentlemen (and, for that matter, to ladies, too) whom the sagacious police intellect “reasonably suspected” of connection with the obnoxious league. This peculiarly English method of circumventing the plans of a constitutional association by a resort to an unconstitutional and illegal act was popularly known as “Grahamizing,” from the fact that it had first been introduced by Postmaster-General Graham to discover what designs certain refugees in London entertained against the Emperor of the French, Napoleon III. Inquisitive Graham had to resign his office, and the government which sanctioned his conduct was also kicked out by the indignant English electors, who are the soul of honor in all questions that do not relate to Ireland. But, despite the fate of Graham, subsequent cabinets did not hesitate to adopt his invention when they had reason to believe that anything calculated to interfere with the status quo was afoot amongst the terrible Irish. Sir William Harcourt, English Home Secretary in 1882, especially distinguished himself by his reckless indulgence in this espionage of the letter-box. His post-office pilferings at last involved him in an avalanche of correspondence that nearly swamped the staff employed in letter steaming.

The sapient Home Secretary had taken it into his bucolic brain that Ireland and Great Britain were undergoing one of those periodical visitations of secret conspiracy which enliven the monotony of existence in those superlatively happy and contented realms. From the amount of his postal communications, and from the brilliant reports of a gifted county inspector, Sir William strongly suspected that one Ryan, a Tipperary farmer, was engaged in less commendable pursuits than turnip-sowing or cabbage-planting. Still, there was no positive proof that Ryan’s whole soul was not centred in his Early Yorks and Mangolds. So resort was had to the Grahamizing process.

For some time Ryan suspected nothing, until his correspondence began to get muddled,—his tailor’s bill coming in an envelope addressed in the spidery calligraphy of his beloved Mary, a scented billet-doux from that devoted one arriving in a formidable-looking official revenue envelope which should have contained an income-tax schedule, a subpœna to appear as a witness in a law-suit at Clonmel reaching him in an envelope with the New York post-mark, and a half a dozen other envelopes being found to contain nothing at all.

Then Ryan smelt a multitude of rats, and he determined to cry quits with the disturbers of his gum and sealing-wax. He adopted the name of Murphy for the purposes of correspondence, and he arranged that the intelligent sub-inspector should know that he was going to receive letters in that euphonious cognomen.

Now, Murphys were as plentiful round there as counts in a state indictment or nominations at a Democratic convention. You couldn’t throw a stone in the location without knocking the eye out of a Murphy. You couldn’t flourish a kippeen there without peeling the skin off a Murphy. If you heard any one appealing to the masses, collectively or individually, to tread on the tail of his coat, you might depend it was a champion Murphy. The tallest man in the parish was a Murphy, the shortest was a Murphy; the stout man who took a square rood of corduroy for a waistcoat was a Murphy, and the mite who could have built a dress suit for himself out of a gooseberry skin was a Murphy. When a good harvest smiled on that part of the country people said the Murphys were thriving, and when small-pox decimated the population it was spoken of as a blight among the Murphys.

So, when the order came down from the Castle that all letters directed to Murphy should be stopped and forwarded to headquarters for perusal, it might naturally be expected that, even under ordinary circumstances, the local postmasters would have decent packages to return to Dublin.

But Ryan didn’t mean to be niggardly in his donations to the central bureau of the postal pimpdom. He took the clan Murphy into his confidence, and every Murphy in that parish wrote to every other Murphy in every other parish, and those Murphys wrote to other Murphys, and the fiery cross went round among the Murphys generally, and the fiat went forth that every Murphy worthy the name of Murphy should write as many letters to the particular Murphy the postmen were after as they could put pen to. It didn’t matter what they were about,—the crops, the weather, the price of provisions,—anything, in fact, or nothing at all. The language was of minor importance,—Irish, however, preferred,—and the Murphy who paid his postage would be considered a traitor to the cause.

Nobly did the Murphys sustain their reputation.

The first day of the interception of the Murphy’s letters, three bags full were deposited in the Under Secretary’s office for perusal.

The morning after sixteen sacks were piled in the room.

The third morning that room was filled up, and they stuffed Mr. Burke’s private sanctum with spare bags.

The fourth morning they occupied a couple of bedrooms.

The fifth morning half a dozen flunkeys were arranging bales of Murphy letters on the stairs.

Then there was a lull in the Castle, for that day was Sunday.

But it was a deceptive lull, because it enabled every right-thinking Murphy to let himself loose, and on Monday three van loads of letters for Mr. Murphy were sent out to the viceregal lodge.

Day after day the stream flowed regularly for about a week, when the grand climax came. It was St. Valentine’s morning, and, in addition to the orthodox correspondence, every man, woman, and child who loved or hated, adored or despised a Murphy, contributed his or her quota to the general chaos.

The post-office authorities had to invoke the aid of the Army Service Corps, and from 8 A.M. till midnight the quays and Phœnix Park were blocked with a caravan of conveyances bearing boxes and chests and tubs and barrels and sacks and hampers of notes and letters and illustrated protestations of affection or highly-colored expressions of contempt for Murphy from every quarter of the inhabitable globe.

Then the bewildered denizens of the Castle had to telegraph to the War Office for permission to take the magazine and the Ordnance Survey quarters, and the Pigeonhouse Fort and a barracks or two, to store the intercepted epistles in.

Forster wouldn’t undertake to go through the work,—the order to overhaul Murphy’s letters had come from Harcourt, and Harcourt would have to do it himself. Well, Harcourt went across, but when he saw the task that had accumulated for him, he threatened to resign unless he was relieved.

Finally, the admiralty ordered the channel fleet to convey the Murphy correspondence out to the middle of the Atlantic, where it was committed to the treacherous waves.

To this day, letters addressed to Mr. Murphy are occasionally picked up a thousand leagues from land, on the stormy ocean, and whenever Sir William Vernon Harcourt reads of such a discovery he disappears for a week, and paragraphs appear in the papers that he is laid up with the gout.

AN OLD IRISH TUNE.

WE had fought, we had marched, we had thirsted all day,
And, footsore and heartsore, at nightfall we lay
By the banks of a streamlet whose thin little flood
A thousand of hoof-beats had churned into mud.
Our tongues were as parched as our spirits were damp,
And misery reigned all supreme in the camp,
When, sweet as the sigh of a zephyr in June,
There stole on our senses an old Irish tune.

It crept low and clear through the whispering pines,
It crossed the dull stream from the enemy’s lines,
And over the dreams of the slumberers cast
The magical spell of a voice from the past;
It lulled and caressed till the accents of pain
Sank to murmurs that seemed to entwine with its strain;
And soothed, as of old by a mother’s soft croon,
Was our worn-out brigade by that old Irish tune.

Now pensive, now lilting, half sob and half smile,
Like the life of our race or the skies of our isle,
Our eyelids it dimmed while it tempted our feet,
For our hearts seemed to chorus its cadences sweet.
Once again in old homes we were children at play,
Or we knelt in the little white chapel to pray.
Or burned with the passion of manhood’s hot noon,
And loved o’er again in that old Irish tune.

A Johnny who crouched by the river’s dark marge,
To pick off our stragglers, neglected his charge,
And out in the moonlight stood, tearful and still,
Most tempting of marks for a rifleman’s skill;
A dozen bright barrels could cover his head,
But never a ball on its death-mission sped;
Our fingers were nerveless to harm the gossoon
Who wept like ourselves at an old Irish tune!

It linked with its strains ere they melted away
True hearts severed only by blue coats and gray,
But faithful on both sides, in triumph and woe,
To the home and the hopes of the long, long ago.
The air seemed to throb with invisible tears
Ere burst from both camps a tornado of cheers,
And a treaty of peace, to be broken too soon,
Was wrought for one night by that old Irish tune.

“HARVEY DUFF.”

THERE is no country in Christendom whose inhabitants are so susceptible to music as the Irish. An itinerant musician, wandering round the different fairs in Ireland, can exercise an influence with his bagpipes or fiddle almost as superhuman as that of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. “God Save Ireland” will hush the listeners into reverential silence; “Savourneen Deelish” will cause tears to glisten on cheeks that a moment before were flushed with merriment; “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” will agitate the toes and rustle the petticoats of two thirds of the living humanity in earshot, and if that instrumentalist fancies himself a John L. Sullivan, and wishes for an opportunity of testing the muscles of the manhood about him, let him try the “Boyne Water” for five minutes. If he don’t get pretty well scattered about, it will be because he has been killed in the lump.

But of all the effects of all the tunes to which all the composers existing for all the centuries have devoted all their genius, there is none so startling, so instantaneous, so blood-curdling as that produced upon a constable by the strains of “Harvey Duff.” A red rag flourished in the eyes of a mad bull, a free-trade pamphlet in a Republican convention, a Chinese policeman ordering Denis Kearney to move on, or a trapped mouse wagging its tail defiantly at a cat helplessly growling outside the wirework, may provoke diabolical ebullitions of wrath; but if you want to see a forty-horse power, Kansas cyclone, Rocky Mountain tornado, Java earthquake, Vesuvius volcano, blue-fire and brimstone, dynamite and gun-cotton, and all the elements combined, crash of rage, hate, venom, spleen, disgust, and agony, just learn “Harvey Duff,” take a trip across to Ireland, insure your life, encase yourself in a suit of mail, and whistle it for the first policeman you meet. The result will amply repay the journey. You needn’t take a return ticket. If he be anything like an average peeler, you won’t want it. It might be as well to ascertain beforehand the number of ribs you possess. It will interest you in hospital to know how many are missing; that is, if you are lucky enough to go to hospital.

Somebody wrote, “The path of glory leads but to the grave.” The performance of “Harvey Duff” leads generally to the nearest cemetery.

How, when, where, and why “Harvey Duff” was composed, or who was its composer, or in what manner the air has become indissolubly associated with the Irish police, is one of those mysteries which, like the authorship of the Letters of Junius, may lead to interminable theories and speculations, but will never be definitely settled.

I suspect that “Harvey Duff,” like Topsy, “growed.”

There is a character of the name, a miserable wretch of a process-server and informer, in Boucicault’s drama, “The Shaughraun,” but the popular “Harvey Duff” is of country origin, and his requiem was first whistled in Connemara, where a theatrical company would be as much out of place as a bottle of rum in a convention of prohibitionists. It is equally difficult to ascertain the cause of the aversion entertained to the melody by the constabulary, but that they hate it with Niagara force has been established a thousand times. Bodies of police have been known to submit to volleys of stones on rare occasions, but, in a long and varied experience, I never met a constable yet who could stand “Harvey Duff” for thirty seconds.

I think it is of Head Constable Gardiner, of Drogheda, the story is told that, when Dr. Collier, a relative who had been away for some years, returned to his native place and he failed to recognize him, the doctor jocosely asked Mr. Gardiner to hum him “Harvey Duff,” as he was anxious to master that national anthem. Before that disciple of Galen had time to finish his request, he found himself battering the pavement with the back of his head, one leg desperately striving to tie itself into a knot, and the other hysterically pointing in the direction of the harvest-moon, whilst the furious Gardiner was looking for a soft spot in the surgeon’s body to bury his drawn sword-bayonet in.

In Kilmallock, County Limerick, on one occasion, a bright, curly-headed little boy of the age of five years was marched into court under an escort of one sub-inspector, two constables, and eight sub-constables, and there and then solemnly charged with having intimidated the aforesaid force of her Majesty’s defenders. It appeared that the small and chubby criminal, on passing the barracks, had tried to whistle something which the garrison imagined to be “Harvey Duff,” and before the barefooted urchin could make his retreat, the sub-inspector’s Napoleonic strategy, aided as it was by the marvellous discipline and bulldog valor of his command, resulted in the capture of the infant, without any serious loss to the loyal battalions. The five-year-old rebel was bound over to keep the peace, so that the Kilmallock policemen might not in future pace their dismal rounds with their hearts in their mouths and their souls in their boots,—that is, if an Irish policeman has either a heart or a soul. The popular belief is that they discard both along with their civilian clothes.[A]

A few days afterwards, in the city of Limerick, an ardent wearer of the dark-green uniform got a lift in the world, and gave an unique gymnastic entertainment for the benefit of the citizens that has immortalized him in the “City of the Violated Treaty,” through the same “Harvey Duff.” He was passing by a lofty grain warehouse. In the topmost story a laborer was industriously winding up by a crane sacks of corn which were attached to the rope below by a fellow-workman. The sub-constable, pausing to survey the operations, was horror-stricken to hear the man aloft enlivening his toil by the unmistakable accompaniment of the atrocious “Harvey Duff.” Fired with heroic zeal, he determined to capture the sacrilegious miscreant and silence his seditious solo. Seizing the corn-porter below, he threatened him with the direst penalties of the law if by signal or shout he warned his musical comrade of his impending fate. Then, when the rope next descended, that strategic sub fastened it round his waist, gave the signal “all right,” and the operatic minstrel began to wind up, not a cargo of grain, but an avenging angel with belt and tunic. How Mephistopheles below told Orpheus above of his approaching danger I know not; but when the passionate peeler was elevated some thirty feet from Mother Earth the ascent suddenly ceased, and there he was left suspended in mid-air, twirling and twisting, and swinging and gyrating, and flinging out upon the passing breeze a cloud of official profanity that made the atmosphere lurid. His promotion lasted for fully half an hour, and, when the arrival of re-enforcements released him from his aerial bondage, the crowd beneath, who had been enjoying his acrobatic feats, and wondering at his ornamental objurgations, thought it better to dissolve before he could recover his breath.

I am not aware whether “Harvey Duff” had ever any words attached to its obnoxious measure, but I think it would be a pity not to convey the ideas of the Royal Irish concerning the tune in imperishable verse, and it is with feelings of profound sympathy I dedicate the following lines to that immaculate body:—

“HARVEY DUFF.”

MY load of woes is hard to bear,
I’m losing flesh with dark despair,
And the top of my head is so awfully bare
It isn’t worth while to dye my hair.
Would you the cause be after knowing
That makes me the baldest peeler going,
That has changed my sweet tones into accents gruff?
’Tis a horrible tune they call “Harvey Duff.”

Oh, “Harvey Duff!” oh, “Harvey Duff!”
If I’ve not heard you often enough,
May a Land League convention dance jigs on my buff,
And keep time to the music of “Harvey Duff!”

I was once with a bailiff serving writs,
My skull was cracked to spoil my wits,
For the bailiff escaped in the darkness dim,
And the mob malafoostered me for him.
But the case that circles my brain is thick,
It cannot be damaged by stone or stick,
And I’d rather submit to such treatment rough
Than be safe to the chorus of “Harvey Duff!”

Oh, “Harvey Duff!” oh, “Harvey Duff!”
Should I meet your composer some day in Bruff,
My bayonet into him with pleasure I’ll stuff
Till he’ll wish he had never learnt “Harvey Duff.”

When duty has called me miles away,
Though hungry and cold, I must needs obey,
And there wasn’t a Christian of either sex
Would give me a sandwich or pint of X.
I couldn’t coax dry bread and water
From father or son, from mother or daughter,
But I always could reckon on more than enough
Of that kind of refreshment called “Harvey Duff!”

Oh, “Harvey Duff!” oh, “Harvey Duff!”
Of you I get more than quantum suff,
And would to the Lord I could collar the muff
Who invented that blasphemous “Harvey Duff!”

I’m so destroyed I wouldn’t care
To go alone to rebel Clare,
And with a reckless spirit dare
To take a farm that’s vacant there.
I know the peasants bold would scatter
My four bones to the wind—no matter;
They’d wake me decent—no heart so tough
As to mock a dead peeler with “Harvey Duff!”

Oh, “Harvey Duff!” oh, “Harvey Duff!”
I wipe my eyes upon my cuff,
As I think that my soul will depart in a huff
To the requiem anthem of “Harvey Duff!”

A SEDITIOUS SLIDE.

WE learn from a special despatch which has been cabled via Shanghai and Yokohama to Britain’s representatives abroad that the demon of anarchy has again broke loose in Ireland, that the flood-gates of sedition have been once more thrown open, and the pestilential torrents of a whole lot of things are deluging society. We feel that a Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary and a very fair acquaintanceship with the slang of nearly thirty States are utterly inadequate to express our tumultuous thoughts on reading the following touching epistle from Cornet Gadfly, who is at present attached to the suite of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland:—

There is some dark plot afoot here to destroy the peace of mind and happiness of her Majesty’s defenders.

I was wending my cheerful way last evening toward my temporary lodgings in the bosom of that highly interesting family, the Higginses, who never did anything so low or ignoble as to work for their country, and are, consequently, enjoying the reward of their virtue, in the shape of a big pension from a grateful government. I was whistling contentedly the refrain of England’s “Marseillaise,” “We don’t want to fight, but by jingo when we do!”

On turning the corner of Rutland Square, my legs evinced a sudden and unexpected interest in the atmospheric and astronomic condition of the heavens, for I found myself progressing homeward at the rate of twenty miles an hour on the back of my head, with one foot pointing triumphantly to Saturn, and the other indicating the whereabouts of the Milky Way.

Having satisfied myself that my bodily inversion was not the result of an earthquake, I wound myself up at the Rotunda railings, ejected a few front teeth and some powerful ejaculations, and surveyed the position.

I had come to grief on a slide some eighteen inches wide and about forty feet in length. The mutinous, seditious, rebellious, and barbarous juvenile population of that ward must have been nearly a week improving that slide, until it was so slippery that a bucket of pitch couldn’t have stuck on it, and a coating of Dublin mud as adhesive as a dish of Boston baked beans, attached to my boot soles, afforded no protection to either person or property. The whole fiendish arrangement must have been organized with devilish ingenuity by either a Fenian engineer or a National League architect. Rage, anguish, revenge, agony, surged through my bosom as I contemplated the icy snare.

But it is strange how the misfortunes of others reconcile us to our own. In this instance, balm was poured upon the troubled waters of my soul and my head was metaphorically bandaged and plastered as I saw approaching the fatal spot, Ensign Wilson of the Lancers, and the fair Araminta Higgins.

They were mashing.

He, in all the pristine glory of a new tunic and a re-dyed sash, preserved the best traditions of the British uniform by the ardor of his suit. He was passionate, eloquent, effusive; she was bashful, simpering, and lackadaisical, as became a pensioned Higgins.

“Araminta,” he murmured softly, “believe no base calumnies. I am as true to thee as—as—as thy father to his pension or the needle to the pole. I am thine—thine only. No power on earth can sever us.”

At this moment he shot off suddenly, leaving his hat at the lady’s feet and slinging his umbrella out into the roadway. A few minutes afterward a dejected and dilapidated British officer was indulging in profane observations of a remarkably ornamental and original description as he supported himself against a friendly lamp-post, while the dormant Irish blood in the fickle Araminta asserted itself through the medium of a coarse laugh.

They vanished in the darkness, but I do not think the enamored ensign spooned any more that night. Barely had they disappeared, when two prominent members of the Constitutional Club crossed the street from the direction of the house of a certain eminent judge. They were energetically discussing the National League campaign in Ulster. They neared the precipice—I mean the slide.

“This Parnellite invasion will fail—utterly fail—if we remain firm,” said the taller of the two, Col. K—H—. “Unity and perseverance must be our watchwords. United we stand—”

He did not finish the sentence, for they became divided, and his head rang out a hollow note of defiance to the breeze. However, despite his desire for unity, the Tory victim did not remain long rooted to the soil, but made tracks for the nearest saloon to recuperate his exhausted energies.

The next visitor to the insurrectionary skating-rink was a well-known attorney, who is at the present moment engaged in an abortive effort to discover an Irish constituency that will have him at any price. Mr. N. looked an attorney in every inch. You could read six-and-eight pence in every wrinkle of his rugged countenance; his protruding coat-tails were veritable embodiments of fieri-facias; his stiff, angular collar had the disagreeable similitude of a bill of costs, and the leather bag he carried in his hand was a positive arsenal of writs and decrees and processes. I felt horror-stricken as I saw this legal luminary stepping briskly to destruction.

Just as he reached one end of the glassy line a little milliner with a bandbox and a brown-paper parcel stepped upon the other.

They had never met before, but the instant their feet touched that atrocious slide they darted together with the enthusiasm of old lovers.

Then there was a collision, and a confused combination of legal documents and straw bonnet, proceedings in bankruptcy and colored ribbons, opinions of counsel and hairpins; and when the law adviser got home he found in his bag an artificial bang where he had been looking for the draft of a will, and that poor little milliner’s duck of a bonnet had vanished out of her ruined bandbox, while its place was filled with a horrible notice to claimants and incumbrancers.

When the law and the lady had gone from my gaze the pantomime was continued by new artists. A poor-law guardian, who had voted against the North Dublin Union adopting the laborers’ act, was explaining his reasons therefor, and appealed to his auditor thus: “You would have done the same yourself in my position. Put yourself in my place.”

And away he went, express speed, on his hands and knees, till he was brought to a stop by his head thundering on a policeman’s belt. Then the policeman sat on top of him, and a postman threw a double somersault over the pair, and the band of the Coldstream Guards marching smartly round the corner got mixed up with them, and it wasn’t till the policeman had half swallowed the trombone, and the poor-law guardian had got the double bass round his neck for a collar, and the postman had been engulfed in the big drum that order was restored, and constitutional peace triumphed once more over revolutionary chaos.

But I ask the civilized and great British Empire, how much longer are we going to tolerate a state of society which permits slides and pitfalls and chasms to be laid for loyal feet, and bruised heads, smashed ribs, and pulverized hip bones to bring woe and desolation to loyal homes? It’s awful!

IVAN PETROKOFFSKY.

IVAN Petrokoffsky, of the 21st Division
Of the Army of the Danube, is a private—nothing more;
And nobody expects of him to form a wise decision
On the diplomatic reasons that have mobilized his corps.
He is rather dull and stupid, and not given much to reading,
And even when he has a thought his words are few and rude;
So when summoned to his sotnia, about that same proceeding
Rough Ivan’s stray ideas were most miserably crude.
But he heard his colonel reading out the regimental order,
Which explains in glowing language why the Russians go to war;
And he holds some dim idea that he’s on the Turkish border,
“For the glory of the Empire and the honor of the Czar!”

Ivan Petrokoffsky is a little tender-hearted—
His feelings, for a private, are completely out of place—
And when from wife and infant, with slow, lingering steps he parted,
No heroic agitation was depicted on his face.
It was well for foolish Ivan that his colonel had not found him,
When the marching order reached him at his home that bitter day,
When the younger Ivan’s chubby little arms were folded round him,
And tearful Mistress Ivan gave her tongue unbounded sway.
There were murmurs of rebellion in that quiet Volga village
(So devoid of patriotic aspirations women are),
When Ivan and his comrades left for scenes of blood and pillage,
“For the glory of the Empire and the honor of the Czar!”

Ivan Petrokoffsky, of the 21st Division
Of the Army of the Danube, is not easy in his mind,
For within the deep recesses of his heart is a suspicion
He has wept farewell forever to the loved ones left behind.
In cruel dreams he sees himself, a shapeless mass and gory,
By the rolling Danube lying, with his purple life-stream spent,
And he has not such a keen appreciation of the glory
Of dying for his country to be happy or content.
He has seen his comrades falling round, all mangled, torn, and bleeding,
And their cries were not of triumph, but of homes and kindred far,
While little recked the vultures, on the gray-robed bodies feeding,
Of “the glory of the Empire or the honor of the Czar!”

THE EMPEROR’S RING.

THE stillness of death broods o’er valley and mountain,
The snow lies below like a funeral shroud;
The clutch of the ice chokes the song of the fountain;
Starry eyes from the skies dimly gleam through each cloud;
When, hark! on the hard, frozen earth strikes the thunder
Of fast-falling hoof-beats with sonorous sound,
Scared villagers waken in somnolent wonder,
The sentinel checks his monotonous round.
Ho! Governor, let not thy dreamings encumber
With pause the swift flight of yon messenger’s wing,
For fatal the stay thou wouldst cause by thy slumber,
The horseman who rides with the Emperor’s ring.

Fresh horse and new pistols—some phrases of warning,
Few and brief, to the chief, and the fort is behind,
And away in the gray of the slow-dawning morning
Flies his steed with the speed of the fierce northern wind.
Out, out through the forests—on, on o’er the meadows,
While castle and cabin and hamlet and town
Rise and fall, come and go, past his vision like shadows.
With white snowy robes over bosoms of brown,
The woodcutter leaps from his path with a shiver;
To their babes, in mute terror, the pale mothers cling;
And the gray-coated hero salutes with a quiver
The ominous flash of the Emperor’s ring.

Some guess, but none question, the message he carries,
All divine by the sign ’tis of life or of death;
And woe to the wretch through whose folly he tarries;
Better Fate, with grim hate, strangled out his first breath,
For earth has no cavern to shield and defend him,
Nor ocean a sheltering island so far
As to hide from the scourge that will torture and rend him,
Whose blunder or crime has enraged the White Czar.
So serf and proud baron, so moujik and banker
Keep aside, unless aid to his mission you bring.
Speed him on, and rejoice when you earn not the rancor
Of one who bears with him the Emperor’s ring.

We Russians are brave, but we only are human;
We cower at a power it is death to offend,
Even Ivan, the bear-killer, shrinks like a woman
From frown of a clown with Alexis as friend.
The wolves on our steppes are a thousand times bolder;
Peer and peasant alike for their banquets they claim;
The blood in yon courtier’s veins may be colder
Than the serfs, but ’twill serve for their feast all the same.
Out there in the solitude, silent and lonely,
These prowlers of night know but Hunger as king.
And the Cossacks may find of that messenger only
A few whitened bones and the Emperor’s ring.

BLACK LORIS.

SPURS jingle and lances shine;
A hundred brave horsemen in line;
Gay voices ring as they merrily sing,
For why should true hearts repine?
The pathway is level and balmy the air,
Their bosoms unruffled by shadow of care;
The sun has but reached its meridian height,
“Twenty versts farther on we shall slumber to-night.”
When, crash! from the thickets that border the way,
Bursts a hail-storm of bullets in death-dealing spray;
In front a wall rises of turban-crowned foes,
And half of the sotnia fall ’neath their blows.
But still with teeth set, and a joyous hurrah,
With lances at rest and a cheer for the Czar,
Charge fifty brave horsemen in line!

Oh, fatal the rifle’s crack!
Ten heroes fight back to back,
And each lance-thrust brings down in the dust
A wolf from the howling pack.
How the yelping curs in myriads swarm!
Ten new foes rise from each prostrate form,
They drop from the trees, they spring from the ground,
Till a blaze of scimetars flashes around.
The ten are scattered; they seem to be
Like derelict spars in an angry sea.
But never a Cossack was known to yield
While his arm a lance or sabre could wield.
Oh, weep their valor by distant Don,
The waves are engulphing them one by one!
But two remain back to back!

His comrade sinks down with a groan—
Black Loris is fighting alone,
His eyeballs glazed and his senses dazed,
And his arms as heavy as stone.
“Surrender!” a hundred harsh voices demand,
For answer he sabres the chief of the band.
But his arm is shivered in twain—he feels
The earth swim round him—he gasps, he reels,
And gleam on his vision old scenes afar,
As he gasps in a dream a last cheer for the Czar—
Was it echo, that sonorous answering peal?
No, no! there’s a rattle of hoof and of steel!
Black Loris is not alone!

No tears for the ninety-nine,
The nation’s heart is their shrine;
But glory’s bays and the Emperor’s praise
For the one man left of the line!
The Don’s deep waters will long be dried,
And stemmed the flow of the Ural’s tide,
The strength and glory of Russia depart,
And the Cossack know cowardice reign in his heart,
Ere the Muscovite legions shall cease to tell
Of dashing Loris who fought so well,
Whose comrades tore him from out the grave,
Whose medal the Emperor’s own hands gave.
And for years to come, when trotting along
Ural and Don, men will sing this song—
“The One and the Ninety-Nine!”

WHO SHOT PHLYNN’S HAT?

I.

MR. PHINEAS PHLYNN, J. P., was a few years ago the agent upon the Irish estates of that erratic and eccentric, but excitable and energetic nobleman, Lord Oglemore. If Mr. Phlynn no longer performs the onerous functions of that office, it is because he has taken to a far-off and less humid sphere his various and variegated vices, and has probably by his importation into a remarkably torrid zone added another to the abundant torments of Pandemonium. In 1879, however, Mr. Phlynn, much to his own satisfaction, but a great deal more to the misery of his neighbors, was still in the flesh. Mr. Phlynn was by no means a happy man. His commission for collecting the rents of his absentee master was only a paltry shilling in the pound, and as Lord Oglemore’s landed property amounted to but a few thousand acres, and Mr. Phlynn’s habits included an addiction to French wines and Irish whiskey, a decided inclination to woo Dame Fortune by speculations on the turf and ventures at the roulette table, and an amorous disposition which plunged him into frequent financial scrapes, he felt that he must wring a bigger percentage out of his employer and increase his emoluments.

But how was it to be done?

He couldn’t raise the rents. They were so high already that the tenantry had some difficulty in reaching them, and were beginning to indulge in mutinous murmurs about abatements and reductions and re-adjustments, and the other pestilential, communistic, and diabolical ideas of the Land League. Phineas had been complaining for months to his noble master about the danger and difficulties of his post, surrounded, as he described himself, by hosts of murderous assassins who thirsted for his gore and wanted to perforate his magisterial hide with surreptitious bullets; and Phineas had strongly hinted that his accumulated risks deserved a commensurate reward in the shape of an additional income. But the only consolation Lord Oglemore vouchsafed was an assurance to Mr. Phlynn that if those “demmed Irish rascals” should make his carcass a repository for any appreciable quantity of lead, the beggars should have their rents raised fifty per cent. all around. This didn’t console Phineas worth a cent, for he felt that if he were laid to rest with his fathers with a few pounds of scrap iron in his manly bosom, he couldn’t enjoy the extra commission on the fifty per cent. rise in any exuberant degree. Besides, the levity of his lordship’s remarks induced the agent to guess that that rather wide-awake peer doubted his dismal forebodings. So Phineas resolved that he would bring matters to a crisis. There should be an outrage—a sanguinary, blood-curdling outrage, that would prove to the unbelieving Oglemore that his agent carried his life in his hand, and was certainly entitled to at least eighteen pence in each pound of the revenue he gathered in perpetual peril.

II.

There was an outrage. As none of the tenantry had the most remote notion of shooting Mr. Phlynn, Mr. Phlynn shot himself—at least, he shot his own hat. There were many obvious advantages in Phineas taking this horrible task upon himself. Of course, the chief of these was the fact that if any desperate tenant had sought to make a target of Mr. Phlynn’s hat, he wouldn’t have paused to ascertain whether Mr. Phlynn’s head was in it or not—really, he might have preferred that the hat should be so tenanted. A circumstance of that sort would have been decidedly inconvenient. With Mr. Phlynn as the assailant of his own hat, no such objectionable mistake was possible. Mr. Phlynn carefully placed the hat on the roadside between his own residence and the nearest police barrack, and fired at it twice. One ball ripped the front rim off and the other tore a hole in the crown. Then carefully replacing his dilapidated head-gear upon his undisturbed cranium, he flung his revolver into the adjacent ditch and rushed breathless into the presence of the sub-inspector in the police barrack aforementioned, and poured into the astonished ears of that horrified luminary a ghastly story of his terrible encounter with a band of four masked miscreants, who had fired at least a dozen times at him, two balls actually grazing his head, in proof of which, behold the battered hat!

III.

The excitement in connection with the matter was intense. The country was scoured for miles around, and thirty or forty arrests made. The revolver, of course, was found, and strengthened Phlynn’s terrible tale. The London papers teemed with denunciations of the weakness of the government which permitted such a state of affairs in a civilized community. Illustrations of the historic hat graced the pictorial pages of English journals. A reward of £500 was offered for any information that would lead to the conviction of anybody. Lord Oglemore made such an exciting speech on the matter in the House of Peers that he positively kept those hereditary legislators awake for twenty minutes—a feat unparalleled in the history of that chamber. There was not so much stir and fuss in that assembly since the day it was rumored that John Brown had been offered a peerage under the title of Earl of Glenlivet. For nearly half of the twenty minutes that the noble senators kept awake it was soul-stirring. Then they fell asleep again, overpowered by their emotions.

All except Lord Oglemore. He was so elated by the temporary prominence given to him as the employer of an Irish agent who had been fired at, that he resolved to perpetuate his celebrity. Why, if he could manage to get some of his tenants hanged or transported for the affair, he would become quite a lion in London society. With this laudable ambition permeating his soul, he drove, immediately after he had concluded his outburst of enthralling eloquence, to the headquarters of the London detective force in Scotland Yard, and, by munificent promises in the event of success, secured the services of that eminent thief-catcher, Inspector Spriggins, to unravel the mystery. The following day, Spriggins, got up as an English horse dealer seeking for Irish equine bargains, left London for Leitrim.

In the mean time the Irish government, who did not feel satisfied with the conduct of the local constabulary, had deputed Sergeant Crawley of the G division, Dublin metropolitan force, to proceed to the same neighborhood, to search for the destroyers of Phineas Phlynn’s hat.

IV.

In the last week in October, Spriggins got on the scent. From all he could hear, see, and judge, he concluded that the outrage was the work of strangers. He had already spotted a suspicious stranger.

About the same time Sergeant Crawley struck the trail. It was evident that the deed had been committed by some one from a distance, because every man, woman, and child within a radius of twenty miles had been arrested, and established their innocence. The foreigner who had failed would be likely to renew the attempt. Were there any non-residents loafing around? Yes! Crawley had fixed his man.

It was certainly peculiar that, while Spriggins was firmly convinced that Crawley had made ribbons of Phlynn’s hat, Crawley was taking measures to arrest Spriggins for attempted murder, and Sub-Inspector Blake of the local police had written to Dublin for a warrant to arrest both Spriggins and Crawley, who were passing under the respective names of Jones and Brennan.

V.

Spriggins, on the first day of November, called upon Phlynn.

“Mr. Phlynn,” said he, “I have got the leader of the gang who fired at you.”

“The devil you have,” said Phlynn. You see Phlynn had very strong reasons for doubting the accuracy of the information.

“Yes,” replied Spriggins; “I have him, no mistake.”

“Where is he?” queried Phineas.

“Here.”

“What!” shouted the agent, as agonizing visions of penal servitude for revolver practice on his own hat made his heart jump. “Who, what, where, when, why, how—”

“Oh,” responded Scotland Yard, “I forgot. Let me introduce myself. I am Inspector Spriggins, of the London detective police. I have been commissioned by Lord Oglemore to fish up this business. I’ve fished. I may say I have landed my salmon. I just want you to fill me up a warrant for the arrest of James Brennan, 5 feet 10 inches, brown hair and whiskers, hazel eyes, a wart on his nose, no particular occupation, and at present sojourning at the Railway Hotel, Mohill. I’ll get the police there to give a hand. No excuses, please. I’ve hooked my trout, I’ve trapped my rabbit, I’ve bagged my fox, I’ve snared my hare—I have him, I tell you. Fill up the warrant.”

Mr. Phineas Phlynn filled up the warrant, and the sagacious Spriggins departed on his mission of legal retribution on the body of the unconscious Crawley.

VI.

“Send down three men from the G division in plain clothes with a warrant for the arrest of John Jones, for the attempted murder of Phineas Phlynn, Lord Oglemore’s agent, on the 3d of October, 1879. Lose no time.” This was the purport of a telegraphic dispatch from Sergeant Crawley to Thomas Henry Burke, Under Secretary for Ireland, in accordance with which three big “G’s” made their first appearance in Mohill on the memorable 1st of November.

VII.

Sub-Inspector Blake told off ten men for special duty on Nov. 1, and about noon arrived with them on three outside cars in the little town of Mohill. “Now, boys,” was his parting advice, “this fellow Jones is a tough-looking customer, and will probably show fight. Brennan’s a rowdy, too. When I whistle, rush in and baton both of ’em if they show fight. If any of the hangers-on in the hotel seem ugly, give them the bayonet.”

“Two men with myself will be enough,” finally remarked Spriggins to Head Constable Walsh, of Mohill. “Our bird’s in the commercial room of the Railway Hotel just now. Perhaps ’twould be better, to avoid suspicion, if your men didn’t come in uniform, and they might wait outside till I whistled for them.”

It was so arranged.

Sergeant Crawley sat in the commercial room of the little hotel, describing the personal peculiarities of the fore-doomed Jones to three official Goliaths who had joined him from Dublin, when the door opened and the redoubtable Jones entered himself. Seeing his prey in deep consultation with three sturdy farmers, Jones muttered softly to himself, “By Jingo, I’ve got the whole crowd!” and instantly sounding the signal, sprang upon Crawley with a drawn pistol in his right hand and the warrant fluttering in his left.

“Holy Moses!” gasped Crawley; “they mean to murder us too,” and he ducked under the table, where Spriggins let go three or four shots at him, while two G men rushed at Spriggins and two local constables grappled with the two G men, and the remaining Dublin detective began a racket on his own account by firing round promiscuously, taking a chip off Spriggins’ ear, slicing a cutlet off Crawley’s cheek, and depositing one of the Mohill men on the half-shell, as it were, by a shot in the abdomen. At this moment Sub-Inspector Blake, his soul afire with war’s dread echoes, leaped into the apartment just in time to receive on his sconce the full weight of a brass spittoon fired by Sergeant Crawley, who, from his intrenchment under the table, was carrying on a destructive artillery bombardment of similar bombshells and grenades. Of course Blake sounded the alarm, and his followers charged with fixed bayonets into the room. They skivered Spriggins, they splintered Crawley, they committed multifarious ravages upon the sacred skins of the Dublin detectives, and in the joyous exhilaration of the hour they skewered each other up against the wainscoating, and pinned each other against the table, and prodded each other through the arms and legs of chairs and couches, and shed each other’s blood for their Queen and Constitution in the most liberal and disinterested manner. Finally, when there wasn’t a square three-inch patch of whole skin among the combined forces, the chambermaids and waiters came in and took the entire lot prisoners. Then followed mutual explanations, a reciprocal production of warrants, general expressions of regret, and a mournfully unanimous feeling that amongst the dark, unsolved problems of agrarian crimes would ever remain the awful mystery of who shot Phineas Phlynn’s hat.

THE RED-HEART DAISY.
A RUSSIAN ALLEGORY.

THE clouds of battle-tempest had blown over;
The storm of wrath
Had swept through fields of ripening corn and clover,
And in its path
Had left the human cyclone’s awful traces
In quivering bodies and distorted faces.

Among the bloody drift of dead and dying
That strewed the ground,
A Prince and Serf, in Death’s communion lying,
The searchers found.
Earth drank both life-streams; as their current ended,
Blue blood and peasant’s in one tide had blended.

Some essence from the forms interred together
Enriched the clay,
And toned with deeper tints the patch of heather
’Neath which they lay—
Rough hide and dainty skin—deep brain and hollow—
Silver and iron—Vulcan and Apollo.

And when the Spring returned, and daisies spangled
The mountain’s crest,
Clusters with hearts of crimson were entangled
Among the rest,
Upon the spot where baron’s dream of glory
Had mingled with the toiler’s duller story.

. . . . . . .

Those who would make our land a frame of metal,
With jewelled heart,
Would have us view the daisy’s centre petal
As thing apart
From its white fringe; and, bringing death to both,
Would mar the flow’ret’s, like the nation’s, growth.

THE TIDE IS TURNING.

SO, masters who have ruled so long
With cruel rods of iron,
Who sought with gyves and fetters strong
Our freedom to environ,
In plenitude of sullen power
Our tearful pleadings spurning:
Prepare ye for your fated hour,
Beware—the tide is turning!
Yes! yes! at last we fling the past
With all its woes behind us,
And stand to-day in firm array
Against the bonds that bind us.

With brutal grip of tyrant hand
Ye choked our aspirations,
And made our fertile motherland
The Niobe of nations;
To feed the vices of your lords,
Ye stole the people’s earning,
And held the theft with hireling swords—
But now the tide is turning!
Yes! yes! to-day your hated sway
Is tottering to ruin,
The Irish race a future face
That will not harbor you in!

Ye kept us chained to ignorance,
In fear that education
Might teach our brains the wisest chance
To liberate the nation.
But, spite of all your guile and thrall,
Our people still are learning
What most will tend your yoke to rend,
And so the tide is turning.
Yes! yes! the cause, despite your laws,
Each rusty chain is breaking;
The portents smile upon our isle,
For Ireland is awaking.

From meadows rich of smooth Kildare
To frowning crags of Kerry,
From ocean-girdled shores of Clare
To busy marts of Derry,
In our opprest, north, south, east, west,
A newer spirit’s burning—
The conquering fire of brave desire,
That tells the tide is turning.
Yes! yes! we mark through centuries dark
The light at last is blazing,
Till on our brow no serf-brand now
Can chill a friendly gazing.

OUR OWN AGAIN.

THE voice of freedom’s sounding
From farthest shore to shore;
And Erin’s pulse is bounding
With manhood’s blood once more;
Our sluggard trance is broken,
We stand erect as men,
Our stern demand is spoken,
We’ll have our own again!

No futile bribes can stay us,
No traitor chiefs control,
No wheedling tones delay us,
No terrors blanch our soul.
The gloomy hour has vanished
And gone forever when
We could be crushed or banished—
We’ll have our own again!

The bluster of the Tories,
And Whigdom’s tempting lies,
Are vain and foolish stories
We spurn and we despise.
We’ve torn the landlord foeman
From out his reeking den,
And now we’ll halt for no man—
We’ll have our own again!

Our eyes are lifted sunward,
No power can bar our course,
Our march must still be onward,
Spite either guile or force;
And be it by the sabre,
The voice, the vote, or pen,
Or steadfast, patient labor—
We’ll have our own again!

THE TALE OF A TAIL.

THERE’S a place in fiery Ulster we may christen Macaroon,
Where they won’t believe in Parnell or the Land League very soon;
Where to call a priest “his rev’rence” treads upon their pious corns,
For they think a priest hoof-shodden, and believe the Pope wears horns;
’Tis there that yells and shouting on the twelfth day of July
Make the populace so thirsty they could drink the Shannon dry;
And ’tis there, where papal bulls could never make a sinner quail,
That a Papist cow has trampled on their feelings with her tail.

Pat Duggan, finding Clifford Lloyd too much for him in Clare,
Thought he’d try his fate in Ulster, so he took a holding there,
And of all the spots of Orange North, that most unlucky coon
Had the evil chance to squat in “no surrender” Macaroon.
And in his blissful ignorance, unmitigated ass,
He trudged a half-a-dozen miles each Sunday morn to mass,
Till his very Christian neighbors, his convictions to assail,
Began to whisper fell designs upon his heifer’s tail.

’Twas in the summer season, and the flies that skirmished round
Discovered that that cow’s soft ears were A 1 feeding ground,
And they gathered in their masses and formed animated plugs,
In perpetual convention, in her sorely troubled lugs;
And when, in her congested ears, agrarian troubles rose,
The poorer flies migrated and they colonized her nose,
But that cow knew neither tenant right, fair rent, nor yet free sale,
For she exercised coercion very strongly with her tail.

When round her nose the leading flies had taken plots on tick,
She would liquidate arrears and clear the district with a flick;
And the enterprising settlers that her ears would fain divide,
With the same obstructive weapon she would scatter far and wide.
Her practice made her perfect, and she grew so strong behind
That when her tail would whisk, ’twas like a gust of stormy wind.
Why, even when Pat Duggan split the handle of his flail,
That cow came in and threshed the oats completely with her tail.

Well, still to mass Pat Duggan every Sunday morning went,
And the Orange farmers round him grew insanely discontent,
Till they held a parish meeting, and decided there and then
That the time for speech was past—the knife was mightier than the pen.
They deputed Bill Mulvany, who was handy with the shears,
And Ned Malone, who’d often sang of clipping Croppy ears,
To see that Duggan’s butter would not pay another gale,
But they little knew his cow had such an energetic tail.

When darkness kicked the daylight out, Mulvany and Malone
Had somehow found their way about Pat Duggan’s byre alone.
The wind that whistled through the trees no warning signal gave,
As Ned Mulvany seized a hoof intended for the grave.
Malone was smart and ready with his fingers on the hasp,
But before the pride of victory their eager hands could grasp,
That dirty cow deposited Mulvany in a pail,
And created much confusion with a flourish of her tail.

And she wasn’t quite content with that: she rushed from out the byre,
Her horns curled up in anger, and her mighty tail on fire;
She seized (with cool indifference to very touching groans)
Malone around the waist and smashed his most important bones;
And when the jury gathered round his mangled fragments there,
And his friends had somehow recognized the mush of skin and hair,
That jury placed Pat Duggan’s cow on very heavy bail,
Because in their opinion she had rather too much tail.

And this is how, in Macaroon, it strangely came to pass,
That Pat Duggan, unmolested still, pursued his way to mass;
And that cow was so respected that no bigot would offend her
Bovine susceptibilities with shouts of “no surrender.”
Why, even on the glorious, immortal twelfth July,
The enthusiastic drummers in dread silence pass her by;
They would rather that the glory they commemorate should pale,
Than again tempt Duggan’s awful cow to exercise her tail.

THE SEA-SICK SUB-COMMISSIONERS.

[In the Common Pleas Division of the High Court of Justice, during the League agitation, the court heard an application on behalf of the Earl of Bantry to substitute service on twenty-one tenants on the Island of Dersey, about a quarter of a mile from the main land, in the barony of Bore, county of Cork. Counsel said that the island was so inaccessible that rents had not been collected there for over two years. Mr. Justice Harrison asked how were the Land Commissioners to get over when they went down to fix fair rents? Counsel said that they would find it difficult enough to get off. The place was so wild that it was only on fine days it was possible to cross Dersey Sound. They went over, however, and these verses record the exploit:]

THERE were three Sub-Commissioners went sailing sou-sou-west,
With due responsibility on each official breast,
To the lonely isle of Dersey they travelled with intent
To investigate and regulate each pining tenant’s rent.
Oh, Moses! how the tempest blew adown the channel wild,
It made the oldest lawyer feel as helpless as a child,
Whilst the chairman had to exercise the greatest legal tact,
For fear his conscience might disgorge a portion of the Act.

They felt, did those commissioners, such physical defaults
As the toper who indulges by mistake in Epsom salts,
And not upon the future were their aspirations cast,
They wanted first to scatter round some relics of the past.
The fish that followed in their wake, cod, mackerel, and fluke,
Had never witnessed so much bait before without a hook,
They were ignorant entirely of the all-important fact
That their unexpected dejeuner was owing to the Act.

They were very sick commissioners upon those troubled seas,
There was something quite seditious in the waves and in the breeze,
And when their tottering footsteps pressed on solid earth once more,
They used up all their handkerchiefs on Dersey’s barren shore,
And they couldn’t relish joyfully the wild delirious sport
That awaited but their presence in the Land Commission Court;
They wanted all to go to bed, and miserably lacked
The enthusiastic courage to administer the Act.

They seemed, those Sub-Commissioners, more circumspect than gay
While hearing Irish evidence interpreted all day,
Although alternate intervals were taken to allow
Opportunities to each of them to wipe his clammy brow.
That evening, at supper, they sought vainly to conceal
A variety of feelings unbecoming to that meal;
And when they sought their couches, with their constitutions racked,
They had tortures worse than striving to elucidate the Act.

CAOINE OF THE CLARE CONSTABULARY.

SO, you’re goin’ out to Aigypt, wirrasthrue!
An’ we’ll niver see your faytures any more,
Millia murther! what in thunder shall we do
Whin you turn your crookid back upon our shore?
All innocint divarsion with yourself will be departin’
An’ existence will become a dreary void;
Ochone an’ ullagone! we must vainly sigh an’ groan;
Philalu! a long adieu to Clifford Lloyd!

No more at midnight’s melancholy stroke
Shall we revel in our customary fun
Of scaring all the humble women folk
In sarchin’ for the shadow of a gun.
There’s an ind to legal riot, they may sleep in peace an’ quiet,
An’ their slumbers niver more will be annoyed;
We’re dejected an’ neglected, an’ we cannot be expected
To be happy after banished Clifford Lloyd!

No more cartridges of buckshot we desire,
’Tis a burden whin we’re not allowed to use it,
An’ our batons may be thrown into the fire—
We may see a peasant’s head an’ dar not bruise it,
The girls may take to coortin’ an’ the boys resume their spoortin’,
An’ life by common people be enjoyed,
In contint, without lamint, since to Africa they’ve sint
That inimy of laughter, Clifford Lloyd!

Misther Healy, you have always been unkind.
But we didn’t think you positively cruel
Till we noticed how you changed ould Gladstone’s mind,
And made him sind away our darlin’ jewel.
Our feelins are diminted an’ our souls are discontinted,
Troth! we’re altogether ruined an’ destroyed,
We’re wailin’ an’ we’re quailin’ and we’re failin’ since the sailin’
Of that father of coercion, Clifford Lloyd!

CLAUSE TWENTY-SIX.
(A COTTER’S REVERY ON THE EMIGRATION CLAUSE OF THE LAND ACT.)

I’ve been towld there’s a chance in the distance,
For struggling poor sowls like myself,
To brighten our dreary existence,
An’ even to gather some pelf,
In a land where the soil is but waitin’
The wooin’ of shovels an’ picks
That we’ll take whin we’re all emigratin’
To fortune by Clause Twenty-six.

It’s hard and it’s sad to be hurried
Away from the strings of my life—
From the spot where my mother lies buried,
The place where I coorted my wife.
Sweet home of my birth, to forsake you,
My conscience remorsefully pricks—
I can’t tell if to lave or to take you,
Bewilderin’ Clause Twenty-six.

For it’s rather too bitther my fate is,
When my luck like a stranger goes by,
When blight settles down on the praties,
An’ the cow that I trusted turns dry;
Whin the turf is too damp to be fuel,
An’, crouched o’er a handful of sticks,
I curse you, misfortune so cruel,
An’ pray for you, Clause Twenty-six.

Whin the rain through the thatch finds a way in,
Till we sleep in a cheerless cowld bath;
Whin the hens are teetotal at layin’,
An’ the pig is as thin as a lath,
Whin the childer are pinin’ an’ ailin’,
An’ losin’ their mirth an’ their tricks—
Oh, I long for the ship to be sailin’
That’s chartered by Clause Twenty-six.

And often at night I’ve a notion,
Whilst hungry they’re lyin’ in bed,
In that plintiful land o’er the ocean
They wouldn’t be cryin’ for bread;
They might even an odd pat of butther
Along with their stirabout mix;
Oh, my heart is too full for to utter
Its thoughts of you, Clause Twenty-six.

To see the health-roses assimble
On the cheeks of my boys, an’ the curls
Once again in the bright mornin’ trimble
With the innocent laugh of my girls;
An’ to feel that herself would be aisy,
Nor frettin’ at trouble or fix.
Mavrone! but I’m mighty nigh crazy
Considerin’ Clause Twenty-six.

JENKINS, M. P.

Mr. Jenkins, M. P., from St. Stephen’s came o’er
To address the electors he’d soothered before,
But he found in their feelings toward him a change,
Manifested in ways both alarming and strange;
He had scarcely extolled their warm hearts in the south
When a wet sod of turf hit him square in the mouth,
And the force of its logic ’twas plain he could see,
For “your argument’s striking,” said Jenkins, M. P.

Then a cat long deceased was propelled at his pate;
Says Jenkins, “Your animal spirits are great.”
A two-year-old egg on his cheek went to batter;
“I’d rather,” he murmured, “not speak of that matter.”
They set fire to the platform, he gasped in affright,
“The subject’s appearing in quite a new light.”
He appealed to his friends to protect him, nor flee,
“For unity’s strength,” argued Jenkins, M. P.

But in vain was their aid from that circle so fond;
He was torn and well soused in a neighboring pond,
And as it was freezing it needn’t be told
That his ardor was damped by a greeting so cold.
And the peelers came up in a charge like the wind—
Not knowing the member, they stormed him behind,
And when he felt bayonets where they shouldn’t be,
“I won’t dwell on these points,” muttered Jenkins, M. P.

He fled to his inn, but avoided the bar,
Where some patriots waited with feathers and tar.
“Sweet creatures,” quoth he, with a satisfied grin,
“Their charity sha’n’t cover much of my sin.”
All bruises and scratches he sought the first train;
“I leave you, electors,” he whispered, “with pain.
’Tis plain that our sentiments do not agree;
I’ll express them elsewhere,” shouted Jenkins, M. P.

THADY MALONE.

HURRAH for our tight little, bright little nation,
The earth’s brightest jewel, the gem of the say;
The garden of Europe, the flower of creation,
Where no sarpints with legs or without them can stay.
Were once we united
Our wrongs should be righted
And ours be the brightest of emerald isles,
But still some intraygur,
Or bastely renayger,
Sells the pass on the cause just as victory smiles.
Yet, no matter, we’ve planned
A divarsion so grand
That we’ll soon have the land altogether our own;
And the rogue who’ll consent
To contribute rack rint
Will meet with the fate of old Thady Malone!

The tailor refused to patch up his torn breeches,
The cobbler declined to take charge of his soles,
An’ though he was rowlin’ in ill-gotten riches,
The heels of his stockin’s were nothin’ but holes,
For his wife wint away
On the very next day
With his mother-in-law (though he didn’t mind that),
An’ sisters and cousins
Departed in dozens,
Till there wasn’t a sowl in the place but the cat.
Why, sorra a doubt,
Sure, the fire it wint out
An’ left him in cowld and in darkness to moan,
Till he felt that the rint
Had been badly ill-spint
That wint to the landlord of Thady Malone!

The praties grew mowldy and bad in the ridges,
The mangolds an’ turnips got frosted an’ sour,
In summer the cows were desthroyed with the midges,
An’ the ass wint an’ drowned himself out in a shower.
The sparrows, diminted,
Grew quite discontinted,
An’ wouldn’t remain in the cabin’s ould thatch;
The pigs tuk to fittin’,
An’ hins that were sittin’
Wint off upon thramp an’ deserted the hatch.
A polis inspector,
A taxes collector,
Came out to protect him from kippeen or stone,
An’ there now he’s stuck,
Without hope, grace, or luck,
Misfortunate, boycotted Thady Malone!

[B] RORY’S REVERIE.

Death o’ my soul! the lot is cast, and mine will be the hand
To free from curse than plague spot worse this corner of the land,
To quench the light of eyes that never glared except in hate,
To stifle evermore the tongue that mocked the poor man’s fate.
’Tis I am proud that from the crowd ’twas I, and I alone,
Was chosen out to pay the debts that half the parish own;
My faith! the country side will ring before the mornin’ light,
Though little knows rack-rentin’ Phil that Rory walks to-night!

How Thade M’Gurk and Redmond Burke across the spreadin’ say,
Driven from home for years to roam ’mid strangers far away,
Will shout with glee the day they see their black and cruel lot,
Their woes, their tears, paid off in years by my avenging shot!
An’ they must know—the tale will go ’twas I, their boyhood’s friend,
That brought at last the tyrant to his well-earned bitter end.
Why, when I meet them next they’ll shake my arms off with delight—
I’m longin’ for the hour of gloom when Rory walks to-night!

Mary’s asleep. Now heaven keep her slumbers safe and sound,—
(“Heaven,” said I? Well, that’s wrong; ’tis Hell is surging hotly round),—
And, nestled closely by her side, my little Kathleen’s face
Seems smiling like an angel’s through the darkness of the place.
She kissed me ere she sank to rest—I’d think it sin just now
To press my burnin’ lips again upon her childish brow;
Perhaps she’d dream about my scheme, and after shun my sight—
I mustn’t think of this—No! no! for Rory walks to-night!

Where’s that ould gun? But softly, so; I’d better make no noise,
I wouldn’t like the wife to know I’d dealings in such toys.
The barrel’s rather rusty: it’s been in the thatch too long—
Musha! the pull is heavy. Well, my trigger-finger’s strong.
And just to think! with this ould thing you lie behind a ditch,
When there’s silence all around you, an’ the night is dark as pitch,
An’ your landlord comes up whistlin’, an’ you spot his shirt-front white,
An’ his tune is changed immediately to “Rory walks to-night!”

And that black Phil has never done kind deed to me or mine;
If he were dead a thousand times none of my blood would pine;
My wife might even bless the hand by which his end was wrought;
My child—but, no, Great God forbid her wronged by such a thought!
She prayed for me at bedtime; sure I stood beside her when
She asked God’s blessing on me, and I dar’ not say Amen:
Amen to such a prayer as that! ’Twould be a curse, a blight,
To pray at all to God or saint, when Rory walks to-night!

What ails me? Am I coward turned? I, who had ever sneer
For every one that showed at all of priest or preacher fear;
I, who have sworn, were once I asked to play a man’s stern part,
No quiver of a nerve should swerve the bullet from his heart!
I’m shakin’ like an aspen—Faugh! I can’t afford to spend
My time in trembling, when I’m due down at the boreen’s end—
What? but a dream? Now God be praised for this sweet mornin’s light,
I’m better plased that, after all, no Rory walked last night.

A DOUBLE SURPRISE.

I.
GALLAGHER’S GOOSE.

CONSTABLE Tom Gallagher, in December, 1880, was in charge of the Ballyblank Royal Irish Constabulary Barracks. A topographist might fail to discover Ballyblank on any Ordnance map of Ireland, but Constable Gallagher’s prototypes abound in every county of the island. He was tall, straight, stiff, red-complexioned, sandy-bearded, self-important, and imbued with that solemn sense of duty to Queen and Constitution which has deprived the Irish constabulary of all the ordinary feelings of weak humanity. He would bayonet with equally grim satisfaction a riotous peasant, a green-ribbon-bedecked maid or matron, or a recalcitrant pig which proved contrary at a rent seizure. Where he was born, who were his parents, what had been his history before he was evolved from the depot in Phœnix Park, Dublin, a full-blown sub in dark-green tunic, with prominent chest and prying eyes, that rested suspiciously and lingered long on every unaccustomed object not familiar to his code of instructions and mode of training—these were mysteries known only to himself, and possibly to the Director-General. The physiognomists of the quiet village of Ballyblank, a few of his own limited command, and a graceless scamp of a medical student, one Harry McCarthy, home for the holidays from the dissecting rooms of the metropolis, professed to trace a striking resemblance between the somewhat rugged contour of his countenance and that of the one man in the parish who disputed unpopularity with him—George Macgrabb, J. P., the agent of Lord Clonboy, the scourge of the district, the terror of its toilers, and the bugaboo of all the little children for miles around.

Certain it was, that, whether any physical affinities marked the two despots of the country side or not, their mental and moral—or immoral—characteristics had drawn them closely together. It was on the recommendation of Macgrabb, J. P., that Gallagher had been appointed to the command of that station. It was on the report of Macgrabb, J. P., that the chief secretary replied in the English Commons to a question about an excessive outburst of loyalty on the part of the constable, which had led that ardent enthusiast in the cause of law and order to direct a fusillade upon a crowd of little boy musicians, who were supposed to be opposing both by singing the chorus of “God Save Ireland.” The sapient secretary declared that the lives of the police were threatened, and the English members cheered the heroism of the constabulary whose lacerating buckshot had scattered the toddling crowd. Above and beyond all, this December, Macgrabb had shown, not only his magisterial approval of the constable as an official, but his interest in him as a man, by a kindly present. In the beginning of the month he had sent to Gallagher a goose.

“You are among strangers, Constable,” he said; “and the unfortunate feeling of disloyalty which pervades this county might reduce you to rougher fare than would be agreeable at the festive Christmas time. Accept this goose as a token of my good-will. Fatten it, and invite your comrades to partake of the hospitable cheer it may afford.”

Now, whether the early associations of that goose with the stingy and miserly household of the agent had accustomed it to a peculiar dietary, or that its depraved appetite was inherent, I cannot say, but the gastronomical horrors recorded of it during Gallagher’s custodianship are preserved among the most glowing traditions of the force. He tried to fatten it, as per invoice, so to speak. He expended all the fervor of a constable’s first love on it. He wrote to the editors of half-a-dozen agricultural papers for information as to the best kind of food to make his goose a sufficiently adipose victim for the sacrificial altar. But the perversity of that web-footed cackler was almost miraculous. The compiler of farm-yard items in the Dublin Farmer’s Gazette recommended boiled Indian meal. The intelligent constable boiled the grain with his own loyal hands, and laid down a saucerful before his white-winged Christmas donation. It spurned the Indian meal, and devoured the saucer. The constable had to retire and read the Riot Act to himself before he could recover from this outrage to his judgment.

The assistant editor who lets himself loose on poultry in the Barndoor Chronicle gave an elaborate recipe, which he warranted to convert Gallagher’s shadowy anatomy of legs and feathers into a pudgy monster of edible delicacy inside a week or so. The belted constabulary knight spent half a day mixing the recipe and stirring it in a canteen kettle. He laid it tenderly before the agent’s goose. The bird sailed into the kettle, and actually gorged the spout before peace was restored in Warsaw. But why continue? Every man in the barracks tried medicinal and culinary experiments upon Gallagher’s goose, but it refused to be fattened. It spent its leisure time in masticating broken bottles, half-bricks, nails, old shoes, copies of the official Gazette, tunic buttons, bayonet sheaths—anything, everything, except flesh-forming food. It exhibited a remarkable appetite for official documents. Private circulars from Col. Hillier, secret instructions from George Bolton, search-warrants, copies of information, it swallowed with an avidity that rendered its general abstinence all the more conspicuous.

I have devoted so much introduction to Gallagher’s goose because a knowledge of the physical and psychological eccentricities of that wonderful fowl, and a due appreciation of its literary tastes, will be necessary to the proper understanding of the memorable events that transpired during the Christmas week of 1880 at Ballyblank.

II.
A PLOT, AND ITS EXECUTION.

The hates, the fears, and the respects of Agent Macgrabb and Constable Gallagher extended to precisely the same two individuals in Ballyblank. They both hated the medical student, Harry McCarthy, before alluded to, and they both feared and consequently respected Pat McCarthy, tenant farmer, and father of that unutterable scapegrace. Both, too, hated Harry for the same reason. He was irreclaimably, obtusely, blindly, madly irreverent of the mighty forces that prevail in Ireland. He never doffed his hat to the agent, majestic representative of property and propriety; he smiled at the constable, personification of British justice and empire, and had actually laughed at the constabulary joint-stock enterprise in goose fattening. Then, he was popular, and your little village tyrant hates no one more bitterly than the man who is loved by the oppressed. Finally, his popularity was due in a great measure to his powers of mimicry, and the fact that Macgrabb and Gallagher were ever the twin objects of his talent in that direction. At weddings and patterns, wakes and fairs, he had made people roar again and again with his reproductions of the peeler’s parade stride and the magistrate’s judicial frown. It would be hard to say which had the greatest abhorrence to free-and-easy Harry. The agent would have gloried in burying him under a pyramid of ejectment writs; the constable would have sacrificed a stripe for the privilege of emptying a company’s charge of buckshot into his obnoxious figure. The disappointment at finding no opportunity to either annoy or hurt him turned Macgrabb blue and Gallagher yellow whenever they encountered Harry’s joyous countenance.

As mentioned, the worthy couple both respected and feared Harry’s father. The policeman respected him because he was the one man in the parish (outside his reckless son) who did not give a traneen for either the agent Macgrabb or the agent’s master, Lord Clonboy. He feared the sturdy farmer, too, from some indefinable sensation that he could not account for. The reasons of the agent’s fear and respect were of a two-fold character. In the first place, Pat McCarthy held a lease; and in the second, he had a daughter. When at the close of a gale Macgrabb could put a ten per cent. screw on the tenants for Lord Clonboy’s Parisian dissipation, and a five per cent. twist for his own less expensive frolics in Dublin, McCarthy could not only pay him a rent, guarded by his lease, one-half what all the surrounding tenants had to contribute, but he could and did express his opinion of the rack-renting proclivities of the rural Nero in language whose emphasis was more marked than its elegance. It had been the life-long dream of the agent to break that lease, and twice had he approached within measurable distance of doing so. Once, when the expenses of Harry’s collegiate education had left the old man short of money, and he had begged for a few weeks’ grace. Again, just a year before, when the universal failure of the crops should in all human probability have left McCarthy nearly bankrupt. But, somehow, the farmer weathered his difficulties, and escaped the penal clause of the lease, which rendered the whole document void if one gale fell in arrears.

I have mentioned a second reason why Macgrabb respected McCarthy. This reason, Miss Ellen McCarthy, was a fair and remarkably excusable one. Why a shrivelled atomy like the agent should feel drawn to a buxom, frolicsome, blue-eyed Irish girl, whose generous sympathies were the opposite of his sordid nature, whose merry laugh was the antithesis of his diabolical grin, who cordially loathed and despised every bone in his body and every constituent element of his soul, I know not; but the fact remained that Macgrabb doated upon McCarthy’s daughter with a devotion so utterly antagonistic to his ordinary selfishness that he couldn’t quite understand it himself.

It led him to a proposal of marriage, whose consequences were singularly disagreeable both to his magisterial dignity and his physical susceptibilities. Miss McCarthy laughed at and ran away from him, and Harry McCarthy, to whom she related the joke, came into the parlor, and with a vehemence that reflected credit upon his sincerity, and a knowledge of sore spots that spoke well for his diligence at surgical studies, kicked the J. P. out of the door, down the steps, across a grass plot, and out into the high road.

It was the day after this occurrence that Macgrabb presented the goose of destiny to Gallagher. A week subsequently the magistrate and the peeler were closeted in the former’s private office.

“Here is the search-warrant, Tom,” observed Macgrabb, laying his hand familiarly on the constable’s arm. “I trust to you to see that no paper escapes you. If I get that last rent receipt into my hands I’ll squelch McCarthy as if a mountain had fallen on him.”

“It’s a risk,” said the policeman, hesitatingly.

“What risk? Information has been sworn that McCarthy’s son has been engaged in treasonable conspiracy, and that arms and illegal documents are in the father’s house. On that information I issue a warrant, and you execute it. It’s your duty to seize all documents—you’re not supposed to have time to read every letter you come across. If you don’t nab that rent receipt—you’ll know it—it’s on blue, thick paper—what harm’s done? Thank God! there’s law in the country, and police authorities can search these blackguards’ dens for fun, if for nothing else, as often as they like. If you do nip the receipt, there’s £50 down for you, and the chance, Tom—think of that, my boy—the chance of having the pleasure of assisting in turning the whole McCarthy brood out, and paying them off for many an old score. Why, at the school party last night Harry gave what he called a character sketch. What do you think it was? A representation of an Irish constable, and voice, legs, gesture, were all in imitation of you. The parish priest laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks, and all the boys and girls yelled with delight. Have you any spirit, man alive, to put up with such insults?”

“Give me the warrant,” growled Gallagher. “I suppose the National papers and the priest, too, for that matter, would call it stealing to take a rent receipt when we’re only looking for Fenian proclamations or copies of the Irish World, but I’ll chance to get even with that jackeen, even if I lose my stripes.”

On the night of Dec. 6, just as the McCarthys were retiring to rest, a loud knocking outside disarranged their programme of repose. Before the summons could be responded to, the door was rudely burst open, and Constable Gallagher, followed by half a dozen armed men, rushed in.

“Blow the brains out of any one that budges a foot or stirs a hand!” he yelled. “Mr. McCarthy, in the name of the Queen and by varchue of my oath—I mane this sarch-warrant—I demand any arms, ammunition, traysonable papers, or documents of any kind delivered up to me.”

McCarthy was surprised, his wife somewhat frightened, but Harry, true to his character, tossed a bundle of medical works on the table and cried, “Arrah! Sergeant dear, just give us your candid opinion of some of these anatomical sketches. What a beautiful skeleton you would make, yourself! Really, I would feel a pleasure in dissecting you. You have such a lot of bones about you that seem out of place.”

The constable paid no heed to this badinage, but with a sign to his followers proceeded to ransack the house. Every paper, envelope, or scrap of writing was seized, despite the indignant protests of McCarthy, and the merciless jeering of the young student.

On leaving, Gallagher grunted, “We will examine these in the barracks. If there’s nothing traysonable in them, you’ll get them back. If there is, why, law’s law, and you had better look out.”

That night, in the privacy of his own particular room, the constable sat down to a perusal of the McCarthy documents. But the excitement of the search, and sundry non-official stimulants to duty that he had indulged in, had made him heavy and sleepy. Leaving the papers spread on the table, he stretched his angular limbs on a bench, and was soon snoring in cadenzas which sounded like intermittent file-firing. He was awakened by a noise at the window. It was daylight. The window was open, and perched upon the sill with a long slip of blue paper in its beak, was the constable’s attenuated goose. A glance at the table showed that the omnivorous cackler had been tasting the flavor of the various papers strewn thereon. Gallagher rushed forward to seize the predatory monster, but with a peculiar chuckle of derision it flew from the window and disappeared from view.