Chapter IV: The Constable’s Christmas Collation (3)

Christmas is here with its fun and frivolity,
Mistletoe, holly-bush, kindness, and cheer,
Warmth and good-feeling, gay laughter and jollity,
We should be happy--for Christmas is here.
Yet to it all we are sadly insensible,
We have no heart for festivities gay--
Ah! the dark future is incomprehensible,
Irish conspiracies hatch night and day.
Oh, dear! what will become of us?
Will they blow up every man or but some of us?
Pity, oh pity, the visages glum of us!
Give us a rest--we are pining away.

Beef and plum-pudding are sadly inferior
To the dread terrors that nightly control
All the dark depths of a peeler’s interior,
Spoiling his liver and crushing his soul!
Though brimming glasses are in the ascendency,
Moistening cannot bring hope to our clay,
For we may not place a moment’s dependency
How long intact shall our rendezvous stay!
O Lord! but the immensity
Of Irish vengeance in all its intensity
Splits through the dullest official head’s density,
Turning our locks into premature gray.

Holiday thoughts are no longer convivial,
Peelers have long since forgotten to smile,
Fears permeate them, not groundless or trivial,
Of the omniscient Skirmisher’s guile.
How could a uniformed breast be hilarious,
When it may shortly be scattered around,
With scarce a prospect--oh future precarious!
That a brass button would ever be found?
Oh, dear! is there a river in
England that hasn’t a dynamite shiver in
Ready to agitate, spasm, and quiver in
Each beating heart that is left above ground?

IRELAND’S PRAYER (MAY, 1885).

Oh, children of that scattered race whose agony and tears
Have called to Heaven for vengeance through seven hundred circling years,
Hark! hear ye not the rising storm that beats on England’s coasts?
The clank of swinging sabres and the tramp of marching hosts?
In every sign and portent read the swift-impending doom
Of that Empire built by fraud and guile on murdered Freedom’s tomb;
See tottering on Britannia’s brow her loose imperial crown--
God nerve the hands, no matter whose, upraised to drag it down!

Beside the storied Pyramids the desert’s swarthy sons
Have strewn the sands with English bleaching bones and rusting guns,
And on another continent the gray coats of the Bear
Advance with grim resolve to choke the Lion in his lair;
Arab or Tartar, what care we whose hand may deal the blow
That lays a Saxon hireling or an Irish traitor low?
Where’er on English ramparts rolls the bloody tide of war,
God bless El Mahdi’s spearmen and the legions of the Czar!

Heaven guide the Zulu assegai until it sinks to rest
From point to butt ensheathëd in a quivering English breast;
May every stinging bullet from a half-breed rifle sped
Complete and end its mission in an English lung or head;
For whosoever smashes blows on Britain’s brazen form,
Whatever hand upon her head brings battle-wrack and storm,
Gives aid to prostrate Ireland that a patriot heart must feel;
So Heaven be with brave Osman, and God prosper Louis Riel!

JOHN BULL’S NEW YEAR.

John Bull looked haggard and drear
With fear,
As the bells rang out the old year,
“Oh, dear!”
He moaned, “but my lot has been sorry and sore,
I ne’er had twelve months of such trouble before,
My neighbors all round seem to thirst for my gore,--
It’s queer.

“With Hans I would like to agree,
For he
Is an inch or two taller than me,
You see;
But he’s gone to the Cape with a rush and a shout,
And I had to vanish or he’d kick me out,
And he says ever since he will ‘pull mine snout
Mit glee.’

“Then Mossoo, who lives o’er the way
Is gay
At my numerous signs of decay
Each day;
He snaps his fingers right under my nose,
Laughs at my protests and treads on my toes,
And has not a pitying word for my woes
To say.

“I once could warn Ivan the bear--
Take care
How the lion you stir in his lair,
Beware!
But now he has laid his big claws on Herat,
And all I can do is to squeal like a cat,
And I fear that some day I’ll be squelched like a rat
Out there.

“But my worst and my ugliest fright,
A sight
That keeps me in shivering plight
All night,
Is the vengeance I earned from poor Pat long ago,
He’s my nearest neighbor but bitterest foe,
And ’tis only just now I’m beginning to know
His might!

“So for me there’s no Happy New Year,
Oh, dear!
But doubt, and misgiving, and fear
Are here.
My neighbors discover I’m toothless and blind,
They cuff me before and they kick me behind,
And in all the world not a friend can I find
To cheer!”

READY AND STEADY.

A FENIAN NEW-YEAR SONG (1867).

Ready, boys, ready, the morning is breaking,
Brace up your sinews and stand to your guns;
Ireland, the shackles of centuries shaking,
Calls o’er the ocean for aid to her sons.
Now, boys, forever Erin’s endeavor
Reaches its triumph or falls on its bier;
Strengthen each soul, be it death-bed or goal,
You must decide in the dawning new year.

Steady, boys, steady, no pausing or flinching,
Comrade or foeman?--your choice must be made;
Saxon and Celt in a death-grapple clinching,
Neither has room for a neutral brigade.
Voices that palter, hearts that may falter,
There is no welcome or place for you here;
Arms but of you men--fearless and true men--
Strike the last blow in the coming new year.

Ready, boys, ready, with quick self-reliance,
Victory marches, but never despair;
Steady, boys, steady, a loud-mouthed defiance
Never scared tiger or wolf from its lair.
Silent, but ready, anxious but steady,
Lean on your arms till the signal you hear,
Then, be your story sadness or glory,
Still, ’twill illumine your country’s new year.

WHY SMITHERS RESIGNED.

So you wish to know why Smithers resigned his position as head constable of Kilmacswiggin? Well, as the night’s young, and I’m not particularly busy, I don’t mind spending half an hour or so in telling you the story.

You see, during the time of the Land League troubles, some of the landlords round here, knowing that they had little reason to expect any overwhelming affection from their tenants, and finding their sources of income, if not castles in the air, at least rents in the clouds, for bad luck to the penny they could collect, began to get uneasy and scared, and thought it would be a wise thing to have a dozen or so more police in the parish, though it’s too many of the same streelers were quartered on us to begin with. The district, barring that the farmers kept their money in their own pockets and used strong language when the rent collector called on them, was quiet, and peaceable, and could have been easily managed without a peeler at all, but the landlords wanted bad to force their rents out of the poor peasantry or take their land from them, as they used to do in the cruel times before the League stepped in and put an extinguisher on their proceedings.

So, as the people couldn’t be tempted to make fools of themselves by playing into the land-grabbers’ hands by such frolics as popping at their agents with old blunderbusses from the back of a hedge, or setting fire to process servers’ hayricks, the landlords began to manufacture outrages on their own account. They wrote threatening letters to each other by the bushel, with skulls, and crossbones, and coffins for date lines, and blood, and blasphemy, and murder reeking in every sentence, and pikes, and guns, and pistols below the signature of “Captain Moonlight” or “Rory of the Hills,” to show how terribly in earnest they were. Oh, they constructed those epistles in the orthodox manner recognized by Mr. Trench in his “Recollections of an Irish Landlord,” and made familiar to the world by the regiments of English special correspondents that were then roaming and perambulating Ireland like journalistic ghouls or body-snatchers looking for corpses to be dissected in the columns of their respective organs. They wrote, too, blood-curdling, gruesome, harrowing narratives of the horrors of life in Kilmacswiggin for the London papers, till one of the Orange members from the North drew attention in the House to what he called the terrible state of affairs in that parish, and, though Healy and Biggar contradicted his assertions, and laughed at his lugubrious forebodings of massacre, rapine, blood, and flame if a whole _corps d’armee_ and a part of the channel squadron wasn’t immediately sent to occupy the bogs and ditches there, the then chief secretary, Buckshot Forster, promised to see into the matter, and he wrote to the head inspector in Dublin, Col. Hillier, and Hillier sent a letter down to Smithers that made that head constable’s ears tingle. He as much as told Smithers that if he didn’t arrest somebody for something or other he might take out his walking papers. Of course Smithers was in a quandary. He’d willingly have arrested the whole parish, man, woman, and child, if he could have found the shadow of an excuse, but he couldn’t, poor fellow.

Just at this time it happened that Pat Moran, at the far end of the parish, was engaged in a little business speculation on his own account, in the shape of a brisk trade in the finest poteen that was ever distilled in these parts--and that’s a big word. The still was away somewhere in the mountains,--it may be there yet, so I shan’t go into geographical details,--and Pat was employed as a kind of messenger between the boys there and some of the hotel keepers and grocers in the towns and villages round who don’t believe in contributing any more to the British revenue than they can help. Maybe he visited me sometimes, and maybe he didn’t. That’s neither here nor there. I may just observe that I never pay taxes willingly. You can take what you like out of that.

Some of Pat’s neighbors grew envious of the good luck he was having, and one day some sleeveen--it was never found out who the stag was--came into the barracks and told Head Constable Smithers that Pat Moran had guns and powder and shot hid away in his old cabin. The sly rogue knew that if he complained to Smithers that it was merely illicit whiskey Pat had, the head constable wouldn’t give a thraneen about the matter, and as like as not would let Pat alone. But the mention of contraband material of war worked up Smithers like a touch of electricity. Why, if he could manage to seize a few rifles and a cartridge or two of dynamite, his fortune was made, his position assured. There was no position he might not attain. He would succeed Clifford Lloyd. He might be made a K. C. B. Dim visions of a peerage even floated through his brain.

In five minutes he was _en route_ for Pat’s, with a dozen constabulary men at his back. How Pat found out he was coming I can’t say; but he did find out while Smithers was still half a mile away. Pat had a hurried consultation with his mother. He had no time to shift a keg of poteen which was in the house, but they hit upon a ruse which might succeed, and at any rate couldn’t make things worse. They wheeled the keg of whiskey under the bed in the back room, and in another minute Pat was lying on the bed with his head enveloped in a Tara hill of bandages, awaiting the crisis.

The crisis came. So did the police. In fact, they came together. The search began. The peelers explored the teapot and kettle for rifles, and seemed disappointed when they found no artillery in the skillet. They sounded the hearthstone, analyzed the cradle, held a sort of post-mortem examination on the furniture, and poked the roof so effectually with their bayonets that it resembled the lid of a pepper-box. The commander went so far as to make the youngest of the force ascend the chimney. He found nothing there but soot. However, he brought enough of that back with him to satisfy his most ardent desires.

Then Smithers prepared to enter the back room, but the old woman clung to his arm and tearfully beseeched him not to do so.

“Ha! ha!” cried the enterprising officer, bursting the door in with his foot, “I smell a rat,” and he rushed into the room, where the first object to meet his gaze was a head raised languidly from the pillow, and poulticed and bandaged to the size of a champion squash or watermelon.

“Oh, wirra! wirra!” sobbed the old woman; “you’ve kilt my boy. He’s very bad with small-pox, ochone! ochone! and the doctor said only this blissid mornin’ that he wasn’t to be wuck at all, at all. It only bruck on him last night, an’ it’s a beautiful pock you have, avick machree; and now--”

But that head constable had leaped ten feet backward clean out of the house, and was licking all previous racing records up the boreen, with his handkerchief to his nose, and his followers tearing after him like a pack of hungry fox-hounds. Talk of Myers, the great Yankee runner! He would have been left in the cold that day.

You may be sure it wasn’t long before the whole story of how Moran fooled the head constable went the rounds of the country. It came to Smithers’ own ears at last, and from that hour he was an altered man. He would retire into the woods to vent his feelings, and people who heard him sometimes say that his oaths would lift the hair on the scalp of an Egyptian mummy. The more he brooded, the more he cursed. There never was a curse, English, Irish, or American, that he didn’t get hold of, and he invented such a lot of brand-new, original, comic, pathetic, eccentric, square, round, oblong, elliptical, severely plain, and highly ornamented or convoluted profane pyrotechnics that a perfume of sulphur and brimstone seemed to hang around his conversation. The habit so crept upon him that when he wished at last to shake it off, he couldn’t. His tongue had grown so accustomed to decorative blasphemy that it could utter nothing else. It became a matter of anxious consideration to him how he was to eliminate from his conversation the picturesque adjectives it would under ordinary circumstances have taken him thirty years to accumulate. He consulted a friendly sub. “Smith,” said he, “I have a [powerful expletive not to be found in any polite guide to conversation] bad habit.”

“Only one,” said his brother official; “that’s nothing. A man who has been on the force ten years and has only acquired one bad habit, has wasted his opportunities.”

“Well, but this is one that is likely to get me into a blank blank [double-barrelled adjective] muss in society some fine day. You see I can’t speak ten words without cursing. If I can, ---- my eyes!” [ophthalmic operation not recognized in modern surgery].

“Ah,” said Harvey Duff 2; “you must repress that custom. It’s low.”

“How the ---- [distant region occasionally alluded to in sermons and theological disquisitions] can I?”

His colleague cogitated. When a policeman cogitates, there are enough scintillations of intellect flashing round to illuminate the interior of an Egyptian pyramid. The result of his meditation was his advice to Smithers to take a pocket-book, and every time he transgressed to take a note of the offence. In twelve hours he had filled up two three-hundred-page memorandum books, and used up a dozen and a half of pencils. It became irksome pottering round with a note-book in one hand and a stick of lead in the other entering everlasting ejaculations; he wore the skin off his fingers, and, besides, he couldn’t keep up with himself, and he missed cataloguing a few score emphatic expressions every five minutes. He adopted another plan. He arranged with his wife that every time he articulated forbidden sounds he should hand her over a penny. He provided himself with £5 in coppers the first day of the arrangement, but he hadn’t a red cent by noon, and in three days he had parted with all his ready cash, made over his next year’s income, and didn’t even own the boots he stood in. Then he agreed with his better half that she should pluck a hair out of his head every time he offended, and now if there’s a more bald-headed man to be found on this side the day of judgment, I’m willing to turn cannibal, and eat him.

His habit attracted the attention of his superiors at last, when his report began to resemble his verbal utterances, and they reprimanded him sharply. He replied in a letter that is preserved in the official archives as a sample of what the English language is capable of. The reading of it drove two Castle authorities mad, and sent the third into a galloping consumption. Well, that’s how Smithers left the force. Strange story, ain’t it?

THE CHARGE OF THE GUARDS AT LONDON TOWER.[I]

BY ALFRED TENNYSON’S GHOST.

Ghastly white with affright,
Down stairs they thundered,
Peelers and grenadiers--
Nearly a hundred.

Out of doors shrieking loud
Rushed the scared hundred,
They had no wish to be
Blown up or sundered.
Crash! went a bomb o’erhead,
“Oh, Lord!” each bearskin said,
Wildly in flight they sped--
Disgruntled hundred.

Bang! went that bombshell near,
Were they o’ercome with fear?
You bet your boots they were--
All of the hundred;
Theirs not to question why
Roof soared aloft to sky--
Theirs but to cut and fly
Sensible hundred.

Women to right of them,
Women to left of them,
Children in front of them
Fainted or wondered;
But they were trained too well--
They knew what meant that shell,
So with a gruesome yell,
Head over heels, pell-mell,
Scattered the hundred.

Did they flash sabres bare
Out on the trembling air?
No, they just left them there,
There to be plundered;
And through the struggling mass,
Matron and babe and lass,
Plunged and strove hard to pass,
Choking and gasping--
Ah, horrified hundred.

Glass smashed to right of them,
Beams flew to left of them,
Walls gaped in front of them,
Shattered and sundered;
All round the citadel,
Stormed by that awful shell,
Plaster and brickbats fell
Down on their heads in storms.
Oh, it was worse than hell;
Out over prostrate forms
Charged all the hundred.

When shall the record fade
Of the quick time they made?
All the world wondered.
Greyhound or Arab steed
Could not excel the speed
Of that swift hundred.

AN ADDRESS TO SLAVES.[J]

Helots of Ireland! Bow down to the stranger;
Bondsmen and serfs! bend the sycophant knee;
Forget the brave hearts who have faced every danger,
Death, dungeon, and exile that ye might be free!
Be Emmet forgotten, Tone’s story unspoken;
Let the green shamrocks wither above their lone graves,
Or should the last sleep of such heroes be broken
Let it be by the shouts that proclaim ye are slaves.

Aye, shout! Though oppression stalks over the old land;
Though thousands are leaving your desolate isle.
Aye, shout! Till your cheers tell the world ye have sold land,
Faith, honor, and truth, for a Prince’s false smile.
The iron has entered your souls, and forever
May it brand you as craven and false to your race;
May the years that roll by bring oblivion never
To cloak your dishonor or shroud your disgrace.

Shout, shout, puny slaves, though each banner that dances
Round the path of the Prince is the alien red,
Crack your throats, though the gleam of yon glittering lances
Is dimmed by the blood of your innocent dead.
Kiss the ground at his feet, though the soldiers that guard him,
Your fathers and kinsmen have ruthlessly slain,
Be dogs to the last, and like mongrels reward him,
By coating in slime every link of your chain.

But cowardly serfs, in your crouching remember
The people and ye are no longer the same,
And every heart where one flickering ember
Of manhood’s ablaze has contempt for your shame.
Then go, join the ranks of the knaves who have bartered
God’s birthright of freedom for titles and gold.
The heart of the nation beats still for the martyred,
Though their glory and cause be unsung and untold.

When ye, abject hounds, and your cheers shall have perished,
When the Prince and his courtiers shall sleep in the grave,
Their name and their fame and their work shall be cherished
While one Irish bosom is faithful and brave.
In honorless tombs all their foes will be rotten,
When the cause that they died for, triumphant and grand,
Shines out, o’er the tombstones of princes forgotten,
In the sunrise of Liberty bathing our land.

EXPLOITS OF AN IRISH REPORTER.

For enterprise, facility of invention and expedient, and the ability to “get there” in spite of every difficulty and obstacle, the American newspaper man is a century ahead of his European brother; but I know of one Irish knight of the stylograph who could give even a Yankee points, if we are to believe his friends.

Brian has been known to take notes in a rain-storm with a sharp-pointed scissors on the ribs of his umbrella.

When his leg was broken in a boiler explosion, he chronicled the event on the bandages.

When he had to disguise himself as a bandsman at an Orange demonstration, he took down the chairman’s speech in the mouth of his trombone.

He sent a graphic account of an Arctic expedition engraven on blocks of ice from Smith’s Sound, and he once pencilled the story of a railway collision on the wooden leg of a survivor. He forgot to mention how the mangled victim was accommodated with an artificial limb so soon after the disaster, but he never bothers his head about such minor details.

But his greatest phonographic achievement was in Central Africa a few years ago. King Mtesa, the dusky potentate discovered by Stanley, picked up from his European guests, among other accomplishments, the art of making speeches. It was a new, a delicious recreation to the savage soul. Twice a month he assembled his warriors, and held forth, and the ebon Secretary of State who failed to ejaculate the Central African substitute for “hear, hear,” at the proper moment, was served up for luncheon on the conclusion of the speech.

Brian heard of this. It became the one burning ambition of his soul to take a shorthand note of the Boston-baked-beans-color orator. He set out for Tanganyika to carry out his project. Accompanied by a dozen sons of night he penetrated the African jungle, swam its turgid rivers, evaded its hungry tribes, escaped its fierce animals, and after weeks of adventure and suffering, with his faithful followers, reached the king’s kraal the evening before one of that monarch’s speeches.

He had been scalped, had all his teeth drawn, lost a few toes, been once half boiled, and on another occasion baked nearly to a sweet and toothsome brown; still he had survived.

But, alas! he had lost his pencil and note-book, and these indispensable adjuncts of caligraphic civilization were unknown in Mtesa’s territory since Stanley had left.

Our reporter, however, had an inventive intellect not to be thwarted by such trifling obstacles. He hunted up a chalk ridge, and when the Cicero in jet addressed his subjects, Brian planted his Zanzibari attendants on their hands and knees, and took the speech in chalk upon their naked backs.

Mtesa, in return for the promise of a copy of the paper containing the speech, furnished the stenographer and his animated note-books with an escort to the coast, and triumph would have crowned Brian’s effort but for the most striking passages of the oration being lost through one of the blacks sitting down on a wet bank before he had been transcribed!

A POLITICAL LESSON SPOILED.

He was a Boston teacher, and of course had an intellect superior to the cut-and-dry theories of instruction that were followed by the common herd of schoolmasters. He believed in object-lessons; in illustrations that should catch the young idea on the fly, as it were. Thus, when he wanted to fix in the memories of the youthful scholars the titles of the principal reigning monarchs and rulers of Europe, he didn’t keep them for half an hour each day iterating monotonously, “the Queen of England,” “the President of France,” “the King of Italy,” “the Emperor of Germany,” “the Sultan of Turkey,” and “the Czar of Russia.” Not he. He elevated his pupils to a higher sense, a more individual appreciation, of the majesties of the Continent. He told Mike, the saloon keeper’s son, to know himself in future as the French President; Franz Schweibiere became Emperor of Germany; he bestowed royal honors on all his most promising pupils, and he felt proudly conscious that he had planted firmly in their minds, as part of their own identity, the knowledge of the sovereigns who are the arbiters of the Old World’s destiny. We draw a veil over his emotions when on a recent unhappy morning the King of Italy held up a greasy hand and piped out, “Please, sir, de Sultan of Turkey won’t be here to-day. De Emperor of Russia hit him a smash in de eye last night, and blinded him!”

THE LION’S LAMENTATION.

They are marching on Herat, half a million men, or more,
Over the frontier they’re swarming;
And they do not seem to mind at all my remonstrative roar,
But grin as if its melody were charming;
Turk and Italian, Teuton and Gaul,
Friends of the past, where, where are ye all?
Great Patience! are ye laughing at the poor old lion’s fall?
Really, the prospect is alarming.

’Tis useless boasting now we can whip them one to ten,
Woe is me! the fact is quite contrary;
We might when “English” soldiers came from Irish hill and glen,
But there’s no recruiting now in Tipperary.
No, nor from Antrim downward to Clare,
From seaboard of Galway across to Kildare,
Can I find a single Irishman to help me anywhere,
Except he be a Corydon or Carey.

Oh dear, oh kind, oh glorious, oh darling Uncle Sam,
Am I not your father and your mother?
Pray listen to the bleatings of the martyred British lamb,
Help, brave soul, oh help, before I smother.
Irving and Arnold your culture will bless,
All the dudes of London your image will caress,
Oscar go across again to teach you how to dress,
And we’ll be the world to one another.

Bennett, Smalley, don’t you hear the marching going on?
The tramp my Indian provinces is shaking,
Greycoats from the Ural and Cossacks from the Don,
Is it any wonder that I’m quaking?
O Lord! the tortures, the terrors I feel!
Even my roar has been changed to a squeal,
And--my heart to palsy, my very blood congeal--
That d--d old Irish wolf-dog is awaking!

MEMORIAL ODE

TO THE IRISH DEAD WHO WERE SLAUGHTERED DURING THE FIFTY YEARS’ REIGN OF VICTORIA, QUEEN OF ENGLAND.

We meet to-night to greet a name
Symbolical for fifty years
Of England’s guilt and England’s shame,
Of Ireland’s blood and Ireland’s tears.
To mingle with the empty glee
Of laugh and cheer from English throat,
A new tone in this Jubilee,--
A strong, discordant, Irish note.

What has she done for us or ours;
What wrong redressed; relieved what pain;
That in her garlanding of flowers
We should conceal our Irish chain?
When on the dreary roadside lying
Were babe and mother faint and dying,
When heaped were nameless Irish graves,
When Irish dead paved ocean’s waves,
When every blast
That swept the mast
Of fever ship was moaning, sighing
The story of an awful crime
That ringing down the aisles of Time
Has filled the universe with song--
A deathless dirge of Ireland’s wrong--
What act of mercy, gentle, human,
What deed of grace to prove her woman,
What sign gave she that Irish true man
Could treasure in his heart to be
A token of her Jubilee?

She came when but one spring had spread
Its buds above our dark decay,
Around, among, between the dead,
Her idle, pompous journey lay,
She saw a million graves, but shed
No tear to wash the sin away.
Before or since what ear hath heard
In all our years of dark eclipse
One feeble protest, or a word
Of pity from her queenly lips.
Nay, when our fearsome famine wail
Pierced e’en an Orient monarch’s soul,
And he stretched hand to save the Gael,
Her jealous pride returned his dole.
For she could watch the infant die upon its mother’s shriveled breast,
But could not bear a stranger’s gem to dim the jewels on her crest.

A faithful mother--so the bear
That rends the bleating lamb apart,
And brings it with her cubs to share,
Betrays a fond, maternal heart.
And oh, how many Irish lambs torn from their weeping mother’s side
By hunger’s pangs in roofless homes can mock Victoria’s mother-pride.
A faithful wife--from prison tomb appeals the strangled Irish voice
Of father fond and husband true, as even Albert--poor Myles Joyce.[K]
And many an Irish orphan sobs, and many a widow shrieks in pain,
At memory of the loved ones lost--butchered in this half-century’s reign.

Could a million of unknown Irish graves yield up the victims
of landlord wrath;
Could the Angel of Life breathe into the bones that bleach the
Atlantic’s lonely path;
Could the dead be recalled from the prison clay and ordered back
from the scaffold’s gloom;
Could we clothe with living flesh and blood the inmates of
madhouse and union tomb;
A parade that would stretch from Pole to Pole, from East to
West over every sea,
Would shadow to littleness scarcely seen the fools who march
in her Jubilee.

Then by the memory of all who fell in holy Ireland’s fight,
Through Famine’s pangs, by steel or rope, we lift our hands
and swear to-night
To keep our banner still aloft, through calm and storm,
through good and ill,
Until the blaze of freedom’s sun illumines every Irish hill.
Let those who will pay tribute still to alien laws and foreign throne,
Ireland shall see a Jubilee and sing Te Deums of her own.

AN ORANGE ORATION.

In no country in either the civilized or the barbaric world can we find the counter-type of the Irish Orangeman. In France, Frenchmen are Frenchmen, whatever may be their religious faith. The Catholic from Bavaria fought side by side with the Prussian Lutheran, when German independence was assailed. When the White Czar summons his legions to the defence of the Russian Empire, the peasant who follows the tenets of the Greek Church takes his place under the eagle standard alongside the persecuted believer in the faith of Rome. The English Catholics are as steadfast in their support of the “meteor flag of Old England” as any of the believers in the motley creeds of that much-religious nation--Methodists, Calvinists, Wesleyans, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Baptists, Episcopalians, or Jumpers. In Ireland alone in this tolerant nineteenth century do we find religious bigotry so ineradical, so irrepressible, so stupid as to be beyond the reach of persuasion and the voice of reason. A condemnation of Orangeism is unnecessary, but a description of one of its votaries may be interesting. Nobody falls in love with a two-headed chimpanzee or a double-tailed baboon, but they are valuable accessories to a dime museum. By and by the Orangeman will find his natural place in a side-show, but in the mean time, for the benefit of future Barnums and Forepaughs, we will sketch the prominent features, personal and historical, of one of the tribe.

Billy Macshiver was born in one of those out-of-the-way villages in Antrim, into which neither intelligence nor common sense has so far penetrated. His father was the hero of many a fierce sectarian strife, as the countless bruises he bore upon his venerable scalp could well testify. From his earliest infancy Billy was taught hatred of everything connected with Catholicity. He was told that the cross was a symbol of superstition, a Catholic church the temple of Lucifer, a Catholic priest a stray fiend who had escaped from Limbo, and the “Papists” generally a lot of poor, benighted idiots, especially created by a benign Providence to afford skulls for himself and his confreres to crack. He learned that England was the most Protestant nation in the world, and consequently the greatest; that the “Boyne Water” was the grandest musical composition of this or any other age; and that the Rev. R. R. Kane, a notorious Orange firebrand, was a second St. Paul. He had been taught to shun everything green as he would the small-pox--there was only one color for a devout Christian to patronize--orange. God had not decorated the trees and fields with orange, because he had reserved that beautiful tint for a chosen few, and didn’t wish it to be too common. Of course, when Billy reached the years of maturity he joined the clan in whose ranks his father’s head had so often been bandaged. He became an Orangeman of the deepest purple dye. He mounted Orange lilies, natural and artificial, resplendent and faded, in the button-hole nearest his heart, on every available opportunity. He learned to play “Croppers, lie down” on the concertina, and to master the mysteries of the jew’s-harp to the stirring anthem of “Protestant Boys.” He led insane processions on every 12th of July, and won endless glory by “knocking out” an old woman who declined to shout “To h--with the Pope” at his modest request.

He is now grand master of an Orange lodge. He is a skilful rhetorician, of course. I quote his last 12th of July speech, to show the stuff that awakens the enthusiasm of his class:--

“Brethren--We have met once more to commemorate to-night the memory of the great, the glorious, the pious, and the--the--the Orange-headed William, and in rising to propose the toast of his immortal memory, I--I--as a matter of fact I--I--get upon my feet. (Cheers.) At no time in the history of Orangeism did there exist a greater necessity to--to--to, in short--drink his memory--that is to say, to drink--to drink--to--oh, you know what I mean. (Tumultuous applause.) The papishes are abroad like roaring lions seeking whom they may devour. Shall they swallow us? (Loud cries of ‘No.’) Our Church has been disestablished, and Mr. Gladstone has kissed the Pope’s toe. (Shame.) Yes, shame; but are there not thousands of Orangemen prepared to wipe out with their toes--their big toes--upon the most fleshy part of Gladstone’s carcass this--this--this insult to Christianity? (Loud applause.) They have put down, to a certain extent, our gay and festive and hilarious gatherings, which used to strike terror to the souls--of--of--well, they struck terror all round to somebody or other. (Hear, hear.) The tyrants won’t allow us to remove the idols from Israel by wrecking any more nunneries. The despots forbid us to let the light of the gospel into Papists’ heads with bludgeons any longer. (Groans.) The love of God has departed from the English Cabinet, and their brutal mercenaries forbid believers in the Word to damn the Pope for less than forty shillings. (Hisses.) But still, my brethren, we can drink the pious memory of the sainted William for threepence-halfpenny a glass (loud cheers), and whilst we bear the name of men shall a threepenny bit stand between us and our noble duty? (Shouts of Never and No surrender.) Gentlemen, fill your glasses with whiskey and Boyne water. Here’s to the glorious memory of the glorious William; here’s to the glorious constitution he gave us; here’s to the glorious Boyne water, and, I may add, the glorious whiskey with which to-night it is allied; here’s to the glorious Queen of England, the glorious mother of a glorious baker’s dozen; here’s to glorious John Brown, the pillar of the state and the true prototype of Martin Luther; to thunder with the Pope, and hell’s bells, artillery, bombshells, prison cells, death knells, and a variegated assortment of diversified yells ring, swing, cling, and ding forever and ever amen in the ears of Davitt and Parnell.” (Frantic applause and several free fights.)

SONG OF KING ALCOHOL.

What Kaiser, Czar, or King since the birthday of the world
Had a rule so universal as I claim?
What conquering banner yet was so far and wide unfurled
As my ensign of destruction and of shame?
My burning fetters bind every race of human kind;
My dominion rules their bodies not alone,
But heart and soul and brain are encircled by my chain,
And their future, as their present, is my own.
Then clink-a-clink the bottle and chink-a-chink the glass!
Send the tankard round, imps, and let the goblet pass!
Ply the fools with whiskey and fill them up with rum,
Till fiends are hoarse with laughter, and angels stricken dumb.

Talk not to me of Nero, that ancient Roman ass;
His tortured slaves in death at last were free.
But the serf who bears the sway of bottle or of glass
Belongs for all eternity to me.
The bravest man who broke a human tyrant’s yoke,
If he once began to worship at my shrine
Would submit strength, courage, all of his manhood to my thrall,
Lose truth and pluck and honor, and be mine.
Then pass the poison freely, circle round the drink,
Do not give the drunkard time to even think.
In a stupid slumber let his conscience dwell,
Till, too late, ha! ha! it awakens up in hell!

Despots oft are hated: it is not so with me--
Homage pay my bondsmen for their pains;
Common helots struggle madly to be free,
Mine lie down and hug their bitter chains.
My triumph through the years is told in blood and tears,
On the scaffold, in the dungeon’s dreary gloom.
I whet the murderer’s knife--rob mother, children, wife--
And built my horrid throne upon the tomb.
Then let the red wine gurgle, let the whiskey flow,
Satan turns the hose on, for the demons know
God and heaven are lost to the fools who sink
Underneath the sway of that cruel monarch, Drink!

CONTRARY COGNOMENS.

If you wanted Fry to cook a chop, you’d find yourself mistaken,
And pills, not rashers, form the stock of enterprising Bacon;
Taylor goes in for selling boots, whilst Butler’s a musician,
And Cooper couldn’t hoop a tub with any expedition;
Long’s only four foot six, but Short’s miraculously long;
Strong’s dying of consumption, but the Weekes continue strong.
It’s strange to find that Butcher is a vegetarian,
That Brewer is teetotal, and Goodchild a bad old man.

Parsons is a publican, and Church an unbeliever,
Lawless a solicitor, Truelove a gay deceiver;
Steel deals in soft goods, Draper’s ware is advertised as hard,
And Gamble would be shocked at sight of domino or card;
Wright’s wrong as oft as any one, Dullman is smart and witty,
Miss Fortune is the luckiest young lady in the city;
Gray’s black, Black’s red, Green’s brown, and Gay is always on the mope,
Leggett is doomed to crutches, and old Curley bald as soap.

AN ÆSTHETIC WOOING.

Angelina Seraphina
Wilhelmina Murphy,
See on knees here Ebenezer
Julius Cæsar Durphy.
I’ve forsaken vows I’ve taken
To a dozen ladies,
Rose and Ella, Annabella,
And Mirella Bradys.
What to me now e’er can be now
Hippolita Flanagan?
Or sweet Dora Leonora
Otherwise O’Branagan?
Or that Hebe Flora Phœbe
Anastatia Hoolahan?
Or Miranda Alexandra
May Amanda Woolahan?

Roderigo Paul Diego
Burke may try his part again;
Or Bernardo Leonardo
Furey seek your heart again.
But be mine, love, as I’m thine, love;
Just espouse my cause, my dear,
And I swear I’ll give our heir
A name to break your jaws, my dear!

THE DRUNKARD’S DREAM.

He slumbered in a quiet sleep beneath Heaven’s sparkling dome,
A man without a single friend, a wretch without a home;
And there he lay, a spectacle to every passer-by--
The only roof that sheltered him, the star-bespangled sky!

Hungry and ill, he’d left the town to roam he knew not where;
Hungry and tired, he slept at last, forgetful of his care;
Forgetful of the agony he’d suffered all the day,
He slumbered now, and care and woe at last had flown away.

He dreamt that he was standing where so long ago he stood;
Again he heard the cheering of a mighty multitude;
He was receiving once again the prize his skill had won--
He heard his father blessing God for having such a son!

His fancy changed: he dreamt he stood beneath the rustling trees,
Which seemed to shake with laughter at the antics of the breeze.
A thousand flowers were ’neath his feet, rich, beautiful and rare,
As he was whispering love-tales to a maiden twice as fair.

He saw her startled attitude, he marked the rising blush,
He saw the tears of pleasure from her lovely eyelids gush,
He saw the joy and happiness she sought not to repress;
And with a thrill he heard again the softly whispered “Yes.”

His dream was changed: again he stood--and she was by his side,
Within the little village church to claim her as his bride;
Joy thrills his heart with happiness, his eyes with pleasure gleam,
When, hark! that noise! he wakes again to find it but a dream!

The wild wind moans in sorrow, and the rain begins to fall;
Where are the pictures of his dream? They’ve vanished one and all.
The lightnings flash, the thunders roll and rattle overhead,
And the very sky seems weeping o’er the joy forever fled!

He tries to rise, but, weak and faint, he cannot stir a limb;
Before his dazzled, weakened eyes the trees begin to swim.
He hears another rattle, and another rattle still,
And now through every nerve there runs a strange and fearful thrill!

A sudden pang has twitched his heart, has robbed him of his breath;
He gasps a moment, then he falls asleep,--but now in death!
The lightning struck him lying there, and severed life’s last link,
And the stars alone are weeping for the victim of the drink.

FREDERICK’S FOLLY.

In a popular Dublin suburb, not quite a day’s forced march from Rathmines,--which, as every tourist in Ireland knows, is the Back Bay of the Hibernian metropolis,--there boarded, lodged, and sent out his washing last Christmas an æsthetic and highly “cul-chawed” young gentleman who had come all the way from London to take up a position in that branch of the civil service which hangs its banners from the outer walls of the Custom House, and receives for idling four hours a day whatever filthy Irish lucre may be presented in the shape of income. To spare the harrowed feelings of his afflicted relatives, I shall expose to a heartless world only his baptismal appellation, Frederick. In the clammy tomb of the miserable past I shall bury the remainder of his official signature.

Fred came, he saw, but he didn’t conquer, for alas! while he saw he was also seen, and his personal charms were not of a nature to strike his landlady’s daughter, a neat little, sweet little, captivating, sparkling Irish maiden, with the amorous feelings that his ardent soul desired. But on this Christmas eve of 1882, fortune had smiled upon Fred with a quarter’s salary, and he determined to add such embellishments to his face and form as should entrance and fill with rapture even a less susceptible heart than beat within the tender bosom of Norah Flaherty. He would pave the way by a Christmas present. He had a work-box. He would fill it with all the little knick-knacks dear to feminine weakness. But it was rather shabby. He would varnish it. Hamilton & Long, of Grafton Street, sold a celebrated composition warranted to change the plainest deal kitchen table into a highly ornamental walnut article-de-luxe, fit to adorn the library of a duke or the boudoir of a countess.

He left home to secure that miraculous compound. He secured it. Having time on hand, he resolved to devote it to the adornment of his person. He dropped into a barber’s temple in Wicklow Street. Now, in the British Isles, you cannot visit a barber for a five-cent shave without being subjected by him to eloquent seductions to purchase three or four dollars’ worth of hair-dyes, washes, cosmetics, and face powders. Frederick’s barber was like the rest of his insular tribe. He had barely got his devastating scissors ready for action on our hero’s cranium before he ventured to suggest that Fred’s hair was not--well, not quite a fashionable color. As the locks in question were of the decidedly martial color usually associated with the uniform of the English line or the--hem--nether garments of the French infantry, Frederick assented.

“You should try our hair-dye, Balsam of Peru,” said the tonsorial artist. “It will make your hair as black as the hob of--I mean as the raven’s wing.”

Fred was about, like an editor, to decline with thanks, when he thought of Norah, pretty little Norah, and in a fatal moment he invested in the dye.

“Your mustache ain’t quite a miracle,” suggested the knight of the scissors.

It wasn’t quite a miracle. It was a somewhat dilapidated, disjointed sort of a mustache--what there was of it. It grew in stray patches and odd hairs, with five minutes’ desert intervals for reflection between the stray oases of tufts and vegetation. Fred mournfully indorsed the coiffeur’s opinion.

“Ah, try our Formula. It would grow whiskers on a billiard ball or a beard on a foundation stone with a single application. Only a shilling.”

A bottle of Formula found its way into Frederick’s pocket.

“Those hairs on your nose don’t remarkably add to the striking beauty of your classic features,” once more insinuated the demon of the lather-pot.

They didn’t. It was strange, but Norah had made a precisely similar remark. In fact, that capillary addition to his proboscis was one of the principal barriers between Frederick and his fondest hopes. He agreed with his evil genius.

“You should use our Depilatory. Bound to make a clothes brush as bare as a smoothing iron. Costs a mere trifle. Only two shillings.”

Alas! He took the Depilatory.

“You’re not a painter?” queried the inquisitive fiend of the curling-tongs.

No, he wasn’t.

“Ah, my mistake. Seemed to me you’d been eating yellow ochre to-day. Natural color of your teeth, I suppose?”

Fred looked disgusted. These personal reflections were becoming monotonous. However, he admitted that the speculator who bought his teeth to retail as imitation pearl studs would scarcely realize a fortune by the investment.

“You really ought to take a bottle of our Fluid Dentifrice. Brush your teeth every night with a few drops, and in a short time ivory would look gloomy beside them. Never knew it to fail. Dirt cheap. Sevenpence-halfpenny, bottle included.”

Frederick purchased, and then, happy in the possession of the magic talismans which were to transform him into an Adonis, he left the hair dresser’s and made his way to a convenient liquor saloon, where he had arranged to meet some of his civil-service associates, ejaculating every now and then _en route_, “Won’t little Norah be surprised?” much to the bewilderment of the passers-by who overheard him. He met his friends. He was so elated with visions of conquest that he “set ’em up” twice. Then another fellow set ’em up. In fact, they set ’em up more or less for about two hours. It must have been more, for, on the occasion of the last reviver, in response to a query about the population of Shanghai, he replied, inanely, “Won’t little Norah be surprised?” When shaking hands for the seventh time with his friends on leaving them, he volunteered the mystifying information that little Norah wouldn’t know him in the morning. He even propounded the problem about Norah’s astonishment to the cabman who drove him home, and that unromantic personage, thinking that it referred to the feelings of the lady of the house when his Bacchanalian passenger should be deposited on the domestic doorstep, replied emphatically, “I should rather think so!” upon which Fred shook hands with the Jehu most effusively.

When he reached the abode of his virtuous but far-seeing landlady, that Roman matron, knowing Fred’s weakness for reading in bed, but doubting his capacity for remaining awake much longer, took the precaution of supplying him with a brevity of a candle some ninety per cent. below Griffith’s valuation. When, in the solitude of his two-pair back, Fred gazed upon the diminutive specimen of the chandler’s art, he felt that there was not a second to lose. He ranged his beautifying treasures on the table, read the directions, secured the tooth-brush, divested himself of his outer clothing, and prepared for action.

At that momentous instant, with a splutter and a gasp, like the warning sob of fate, the candle went out!

For a moment Fred deliberated. Should he kick up a row for more composite? No. The Gorgon of the house might suspect something. Besides, he knew where each wonderful phial lay. To work! to work! Won’t little Norah be surprised? Won’t he whelm those conceited Irish rivals of his with envy and chagrin?

He grabbed the Depilatory, and gave his nose five minutes’ determined friction. He seized the tooth-brush, and, saturating that toilet requisite with Fluid Dentifrice, he applied it to his teeth till his jaws ached. He groped around till his fingers closed upon the Balsam of Peru, and he drenched his fiery locks with it until his head felt like a sponge. And then with loving hand he sought the Formula. He found it. He tenderly moistened his upper lip. Should he have an imperial? Why not? He traced the imperial artistically out. And now, his task of decoration complete, he stumbled into bed, and murmuring softly, “Won’t little Norah be surprised?” sank peacefully to slumber--to dream he had Hyperion curls and pearly teeth, the mustachios of D’Artagnan the Musketeer, and the nose of an Adonis.

* * * * *

Bold chanticleer had been proclaiming the dawn for an hour or two when Frederick awoke. The top of his head felt queer--that last toddy, no doubt. He was rather stiff about the mouth. Oh, joy! joy! the mustache. Not even waiting to encase his lower limbs in the nameless appendages of civilization he rushed to the looking-glass. And then there rang out upon the morning air a dismal, prolonged, forty-horse-power howl that made the matutinal milkman drop his cans in the gutter and settled the last lingering doubts of a stray cur in the street, which was meditating madness, for the electrified canine wanderer went for that indefatigable officer Q3½, and helped himself to a Christmas breakfast, composed of a square foot of blue cloth and a few ounces of metropolitan police manhood. The astounded constable started for the nearest druggist’s, and, charging impetuously into the store, knocked over an old lady with a parcel of chamomile and poppy-heads, and so alarmed the salesman that he could only express his feelings by vociferating “Fire!” at the top of his lungs, which appalling cry had such an effect upon the other assistant, who was swilling the snow-slushy footway in front, that he promptly turned the nozzle of the hose in through the door, and belched forth such a flood that he swept lady, policeman, poppy-heads, chamomile, half a dozen bottles, three or four gross of pills, and a varied assortment of drugs into the back premises, where he bombarded them for ten minutes with aqueous artillery, and left them deluged in wild and dripping confusion.

That unearthly cry also brought scrambling up into Frederick’s room an excited crowd of boarders and servants, headed by the landlady, and there, in the middle of the floor, arrayed only in a picturesque night-shirt, was a strange figure with bald head, black teeth, walnut lips and chin, with a beard a foot long drooping from his nose--cavorting round in a Sioux war-dance, to the strains of a weird melody, the refrain of which was “Won’t little Norah be surprised?”

It was Frederick. He had mixed things in the dark. He had brushed his teeth with the hair-dye, Balsam of Peru, and they had gone into mourning over the outrage. He had tried to tone down the fiery aspect of his curls with the Depilatory, and he had toned them off his head altogether. He had sought to remove the superfluous hirsute attraction of his nose with the Formula, and he had added twelve inches to its growth. To improve the undecided tendencies of his mustache he had invoked the aid of the renowned Furniture Renovator, and he had so renovated the surroundings of his mouth that it resembled the drawer of a walnut escritoire.

Sad, sad fate. Little Norah was surprised even more than Fred had anticipated, but so little did she appreciate his sacrifice that she is now another’s.

CONSTABLE X.