Chapter IV: The Constable’s Christmas Collation (4)

Whose walk is so stately and grand round the beat?
What tread sounds so martial upon the flagged street?
What countenance, calm as the face of the Sphinx,
Repels so the notion of frivolous winks?
Adored by the housemaid, beloved by the cook,
Whose souls he can harrow or thrill with a look;
The terror of urchins, whose ardor he checks,
Oh, who should it be but bold Constable X?

How the heart of the guilty against his ribs knocks,
As, rubbing his collar, he enters the box,
And kisses the book with a resonant smack,
Like the click of a latch or a rifle’s sharp crack.
Swear a hole through a pot? why he’d think it no feat
To swear holes through the whole of an ironclad fleet,
And no counsel the Four Courts can boast could perplex
Or puzzle that paragon, Constable X.

Yet he is not immortal; the greatest have hours
When the mind can descend from the stars to the flowers,
And he, even he, that great creature, has known
Some moments when grandeur deserted its throne.
And the pride of the Force at such times would have felt
Belittled, indeed, were it not for his belt.
For Cupid, the rogue, who ne’er comes but to vex,
Has got inside the tunic of Constable X.

Let the thoughtless world smile or condemn, if it please,
But, alas! ’tis the truth, he’s been seen on his knees,
He has even unbended to laughter and sport,
And his kiss has resounded outside of the court,
Oh, weep for his downfall, oh, mourn for his fate!
Redemption is hopeless and rescue too late;
Love’s handcuffs are on him, and one of the sex
Who ne’er release prisoners, has Constable X.

LUCIFER’S LABORATORY.

Surrounded by bottles and flagons and bowls,
To the music of shrieks from perishing souls,
Holding a lurid and snake-wreathed flask,
The Devil pursued his terrible task.
Hatred and lust, and all the horde
Of hell’s worst vices into it he poured,
And when it was brimming with fever and sin,
He took the bottle and labelled it GIN.

Another flask in his hand he raised
And the flame of his breath round the crystal blazed,
As he filled it with murder, suicide, theft,
Orphans fatherless, wives bereft,
Doses of poverty, doses of crime,
For every region, for every clime,
And the noisiest imps round his throne were dumb
As he took the bottle and labelled it RUM.

And then a barrel he seized to fill
With grief and affliction, pain and ill;
Stupor, the brain of mankind to dim;
Coma, to palsy the heart and limb;
Draughts, the senses to cloud and clog
Till God’s image became but a senseless log,
And the devil’s lips were twined in a leer
As he took that barrel and labelled it BEER.

The fiends laughed loud in rapturous mirth
As he scattered his mixtures around the earth.
And whiteskin, and blackskin, and redskin quaffed,
North, South, East, West, the poisonous draught.
And the demon yell as each toper fell,
Voiced the chorus, “Another recruit for hell!
Hurrah for the triumph of Satan and sin,
Brought about by the conquest of whiskey and gin!”

THE MONOPOLIST’S MOAN.

Am I waking or sleeping, in Congress or bed?
Do I stand on my feet? am I poised on my head?
Has the world gone to smash? is it chaos that reigns?
Or have I somehow lost a grip of my brains?
There’s something gone wrong which I cannot make out,
The people don’t know what on earth they’re about;
There is woe in our camp and dismay in our tents,
For no longer we rule with our dollars and cents.

Has the crispy bank-note lost its wonderful powers?
Are the lives and the souls of the people not ours?
Fame’s ladder saw us on the top, and you know
That muscle and brain were contented below;
Leastways, if they murmured, a handful of gold
Could buy up the weak or could crush out the bold,
For a very small gift from our riches contents
The outcast who hasn’t got dollars and cents.

But now there’s a muttering startling and strange
From the lowermost depths, a demand for a change,
A really absurd and ridiculous plan
To ostracize gold and to dignify man;
The base common herd won’t submit any more
To a rule that their fathers found proper before,
And the veriest scum of the gutters invents
Ideas obnoxious to dollars and cents.

WITH THE GRAND ARMY VETERANS.

AT GRANT’S FUNERAL, AUGUST 8, 1885.

Once again, in silence solemn, forms the remnant of the column
That had borne with Grant the fever and the load of darksome days;
Some are worn and old and stooping, like the colors furled or drooping
’Neath the crape that hides the tatters and the rents of battle’s blaze.

Through the voiceless, mourning city, draped in sombre garb of pity,
Keeping step in rhythmic cadence marches past the old brigade;
And the watching crowds that border mark the old-time soldier order--
The symmetrical alignment of the veteran parade.

At the measured tread resounding warrior fancies pierce surrounding
Mists and clouds of two long decades--picture visions far away,
Where Potomac rolls its billow over many a hero’s pillow,
Or the Rappahannock murmurs dirges still to Blue and Gray.

Hark! the muffled drums are beating calls for charging or retreating,
And their old Commander leads again the legions of the free;
In the funeral anthems tolling they can hear war’s thunder rolling;
They are marching on to Richmond, or Atlanta to the sea.

See, their dimming eyes grow brighter and their painful footsteps lighter;
The dead-marches seem to echo like familiar camping strains,
And the “boys” again together tramp through swamp or over heather,
Joyous only in their triumphs and forgetful of their pains.

Their Commander is not sleeping. Why, his eagle glance is sweeping
With mingled pride and pleasure o’er the tried and faithful line;
Cheers again the skies are rending, and their serried ranks ascending
The slippery slopes of Vicksburg, o’er abandoned scarp and mine.

Still more vivid grows the seeming: still more real is the dreaming,
While a milder radiance mingles with the conflict’s passioned glow,
For in Victory’s fevered hour, Mercy holds the hands of power,
Like their leader, they know only former brothers in the foe.

* * * * *

Halt! The soldier’s dream is over, and gray scattered locks uncover;
Not the laurel but the cypress with their banners must entwine;
For the last salute is pealing, as his faithful comrades, kneeling,
Weep farewell, farewell forever, to the Leader of the line.

Yet, no; Fate cannot sever ties so firmly linked forever,
And, when Time shall close the record of all nations’ peace and war,
The Angel’s trump shall waken ranks unbroken and unshaken,
And their old Commander lead them through the Golden Gates Ajar.

THE IRISH SOLDIER AT GRANT’S GRAVE.

Great chieftain, o’er thy silent clay
Unite in tears the Blue and Gray,
Grief knows no frontier line to-day.

Among the gifts the nation showers
Upon thy tomb blooms verdant ours--
A shamrock wreath among the flowers.

A type its emerald leaflets three
Of thy best attributes will be--
Faith, Courage, and Humanity.

Faith in the right, whate’er oppose,
Courage that with disaster rose,
Mercy to brave but beaten foes.

When danger threatened Freedom’s shrine
In her defence with thee and thine
Our exiled race were found in line.

With thee we bore the storm and stress,
Hard-fought retreat and onward press
Of Vicksburg and the Wilderness.

Thy eagle glances oft might scan
Our Celtic features in the van
When battle surged round Sheridan.

And never poured the crimson flood,
To mark where desperate valor stood,
But with the tide ebbed Irish blood.

So as your life-stream then we fed,
Where’er your own brave nation bled,
Our tears to-day with hers are shed.

Our steel shone ’mid your bayonets,
Our grief now sobs with your regrets,
Our shamrocks fringe your violets.

MAINE AND MAYO.

Six months in front of Richmond’s walls we fretted and we fumed,
As vainly as our peevish growls our surly cannon boomed;
We traced no path of glory through the slimy, oozy swamp,
But misery and discontent were monarchs of our camp.
There was snarling and complaining all along the Union line,
And our brigade was loudest in the universal whine,
While the surliest, the churliest, the sourest in our train
Was a cross and crusty, rude and rusty, lanky crank from Maine.

Death lurked in half a dozen shapes among the vapors foul,
The grumbling choir each morning lacked some long-familiar howl;
And to fill the vacant places new arrivals were impressed,
Whose tempers in a week or so grew viler than the rest.
One day with such a batch there came a boy with sunny hair,
And a laugh that took the breath away of every veteran there,
Who said to us, in accents like a streamlet’s rippling flow,
“I’m very glad to meet ye--I’m a stranger from Mayo.”

Lord! how that youngster danced and sang and laughed his cheerful way
To hearts sealed up by selfishness for many a gloomy day;
He gave Time golden pinions with a thousand merry wiles,
And routed regiments of blues with fusilades of smiles.
Our crank of cranks fought sullenly, with dismal brow, at first,
Frowned like a Northern thunder-cloud, the while he inly cursed;
But his wintry soul grew warmer in the genial Irish glow,
Till the frost from Maine was melted by the sunshine from Mayo.

And when on quiet evenings from out our camp arose
Strange sounds of mirth and merriment that puzzled lurking foes,
When “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” shook the leafless Southern pines,
Or “The Rocky Road to Dublin” seemed a-winding through our lines,
A pair of feet went treading through the dance’s tangled maze
With a firm, determined step acquired in lumber-hauling days--
“Who Fears to Speak of Ninety-eight?” was sometimes the refrain,
And one sonorous voice objected to such cowardice in Maine.

* * * * *

Our corps is but a corporal’s guard; beneath Virginian clay,
Its heroes wait the bugle-blast of God’s reviewing day,
But the “twins,” as once we called them, Celt and Yankee, still remain,
Though one’s at home in Connaught, and the other back in Maine.
Outside the Mayo cabin green and starry flags proclaim
That Ireland’s in the Union now in everything but name;
While in Aroostook County a grim veteran wants to know
How soon will freedom need recruits to battle for Mayo.

A SANDY ROW SKIRMISH.

Sandy Row, as everybody knows, is the Mecca and Medina of Orangeism in Belfast, the sacred shrine of its votaries, the land of promise of its true-blue tramps, the camp of its generals, the temple of its apostles, the sanctuary and haven of its political refugees, when fleeing from prospective fines of forty shillings and costs for holy war-cries of “To h--with the Pope.” If a Papist foot should dare pollute its consecrated--whiskey consecrated--shore, that Papist foot would be carrying a head that was in danger of having what little brains it contained undergo a process of amalgamation with the oleaginous slush of the desecrated pavement.

In that home of Hobah has resided for many years and seasons one Green--Billy Green, so called after the hero of glorious, pious, and immortal memory, in whose saintly footsteps he has endeavored to tread as far as his post of grand master of L. O. L. 1111, “Spartan Schomberg,” would permit. But, alas! brave Billy has been wounded in more numerous and more tender portions of his constantly constitutional anatomy than was ever his regal namesake in the course of all his campaigns; and, worst of all, his fate excites no charitable commiseration or solacing sympathy in his lodge or among his neighbors, but only provokes tantalizing titters and lacerating laughter. He has suffered, he still suffers, he is likely to continue suffering for half a century or so, but not, oh, not for the cause.

In his ardent devotion to his principles and his lodge, and also in consideration of a certain weekly honorarium, Billy fitted up in his back yard an outhouse in which he allowed to be stored their sashes, banners, and regalia for processions, and their bludgeons, blunderbusses, and pokers intended for political arguments with National League invaders.

For three months in this shanty L. O. L. 1111 guarded its sacred banners and kept its powder dry. However, during the past few weeks, an assemblage of peace disturbers, who paid no rent, subscribed to no loyal principles, marched in no patriotic processions, and joined in no salubrious Tory scrimmages, have had illegal possession of that cabin.

During that time its roof has borne the erring feet of all the cats of Sandy Row. There has been a convocation, a conference, a mass meeting, a howling congregation of cats there from midnight to dawn, who have given musical entertainments of excruciating variety and such persistent continuity that they have never indulged in even ten minutes’ interval for refreshments. About ten minutes to twelve a tortoise-shell tenor gives the signal for devotions by a prolonged squeal in G sharp. Then a short-tailed Persian soprano joins in, and there is a five minutes’ duet, to which a Highland bagpipes, a Savoyard hurdy-gurdy, or Red Shirt’s war-whoop is the music of the spheres. When they have reached the most horrifying part of this performance a black demon with the influenza throws in a basso-profundo remonstrance, and a gray tabby with the catarrh serenades the moon in an agonizing solo, with scales and variations. Then the midnight feline wanderers lift up their voices in scores (numerically and vocally), and a competitive chorus begins, into which each cat seems to throw its very vitals, and the air trembles with heart-rending screeches, and yells, and spits, and growls, and hisses, and whistles, and cries for help, and moans, and groans, and raspings; and the twins in Jones’s, next door, waken up and join in the medley, and Mr. and Mrs. Jones try to soothe them to slumber with soul-sickening lullabies; and the lodgers put their heads out of the window, and swear at the cats in baritone and a North of Ireland accent; and all the dogs in the street join in with diversified barks and carefully assorted yelps, from the shrill treble of the parson’s Skye terrier to the thundering tones of the grocer’s mastiff, while the milkman’s jackass kicks the panel out of his stable door, and, putting his head through, ejaculates a hoarse demand for thistles in such a diabolical bray that you think chaos has come again, and Pandemonium reigns supreme.

From beginning to end, from the initial bar to the final cadenza, there isn’t a pianissimo movement in the whole operatic celebration, or symphony, or overture, or musical festival, or whatever you like to call it. It’s all fortissimo, awfully fortissimo, say about four-hundred-and-forty-four tissimo.

The good men and true of Sandy Row determined that they would submit to this invasion of their rights, this outrage upon their dignity, this systematic suppression of their slumbers, no longer. The amount of old boots, stray bottles, broken candlesticks, and used-up culinary utensils with which those cats had been bombarded would have established a flourishing marine store business, but these munitions of war had been exhausted without disabling a single cat. It was evident that desperate measures were necessary to restore law and order in Green’s back yard. They were adopted.

Unfortunately for Green, his neighbors acted in skirmishing order--each man on his own account; no general plan of organization; no commander--a kind of guerilla warfare, in fact, was to be waged on the melodiously maddening marauders!

Jones got a blunderbuss and loaded it to the muzzle with broken glass, rusty nails, buckshot, and darning needles.

Tomlinson, the tailor, carted in a load of half-bricks and paving stones, and piled them up in his bedroom for action.

The grocer laid a three-inch hose on to the pipe in his scullery, and completed scientific arrangements for a powerful pressure.

Poor Green himself, whose repeated failures from the back window as a marksman had disgusted him with that method of attack, got a long cavalry sword, and determined to tackle the enemy with cold steel.

Alas! there was no preliminary consultation. Why, oh, why, was not Lord Rossmore there to direct the strategy of these noble defenders of homes and altars, civil and religious liberty, and uninterrupted snores?

About 11.30 on New-Year’s night, the quadrupedal Pattis and Nicolinis commenced their usual grand concert. Green waited patiently until they had got through the preliminary solos, but when they commenced some Wagnerian horror in chorus, he slipped out silently, in wrath and his night-shirt, and crept, sword in hand, towards the fatal shed.

Almost at the same moment three neighboring windows were noiselessly raised, and preparations for three terrific onslaughts were rapidly perfected.

It was dark,--so dark that the gleaming orbits of the phosphorescent choristers could scarcely be discerned, and the artillerists and rifle rangers had little but the mortifying music to direct their deadly aim.

Suddenly that ceased. The videttes of the caterwauling corps had caught a glimpse of Green’s nightgown as it was floating and fluttering gracefully in the winter breeze. In an instant, however, mounting a step-ladder, he was amongst them; and as the sabre of his sire whirled round him in vengeful sweeps, stabs, slashes, and scintillations, a hundred expressions of feline astonishment, fear, pain, expostulation, and rage burst like a tornado from the lungs of a hundred different cats, and the concentrated essence of their three months’ lyrical training surged through their teeth in one stupendous, ear-splitting, paralyzing, five-hundred-dollar prize screech.

Victory irradiated the manly brow of Green with a mystic halo; but alas, like Wolfe at Quebec, or Nelson at Trafalgar, he was fated to fall in the hour of his triumph, for just then a jagged brick, hurled by Tomlinson with the velocity of a bombshell, caught him in the small of the back, a washing-mug, donated to the general good by the Roman matron spirit of Mrs. T., was splintered into fragments on his head, a shower of sharp-pointed paving-stones rattled about his ribs, and when he turned round to scream “Cease Firing,” a three-inch Niagara from the grocery caught him square in the mouth, and tumbled him head over heels off the shed. As he was wheeling in an insane somersault through the air, bang! went Jones’s blunderbuss, and it seemed to Green as if all the cats had suddenly combined in a ferocious and fiendish charge upon his person, and were clawing him in about ten million directions.

The doctors have been exploring his carcass ever since, and striking new veins of scrap-iron and lead at every excavation. The nurses at the Northern Hospital say that no such thrilling sight has ever been witnessed in that institution in their experience as is afforded by the spectacle of one surgeon taking nails out of his legs with a pair of pincers, while another operates on his shoulder with a screw-driver, and the third man threads the eyes of protruding needles and draws them out by the gross. It is the general opinion among these professional men that to clear him out thoroughly they want a laborer or two with pickaxes and shovels.

Green himself vows that, if he ever recovers, he will quit L. O. L. 1111 forever. When the rank and file can’t tell the difference between a tom-cat and a grand master, it’s time to vacate the latter post. He thinks the government is very remiss in allowing the Orangemen to retain their weapons. If Jones don’t get three years under the Crimes Act for carrying arms in a proclaimed district and perforating a loyal hide with the contents of a tinker’s budget--why, he’ll join the Fenians, that’s all. They have one motto he appreciates:--

Whether on the scaffold high,
Or in the battle’s van,
The fittest place for man to die
Is where he dies for man.

That’s decent. It sounds a great deal better than dying on the top of an old shed in a dirty back yard for a lot of confounded cats. But he’s not going to die if he knows it. He don’t want the poet laureate of L. O. L. 1111 to let himself loose on his tombstone in this fashion:--

Here lies the body of Billy Green,
As true a grand master as ever was seen,
But although he was green and decidedly fat,
He was shot with tenpenny nails, pellets, broken glass,
false teeth, pipe-shanks, darning needles, and a
lot of undiscovered ironmongery, in mistake for a
measly, mangy, stumpy-tailed skeleton of a tortoise-shell
cat.

THE PRIEST WITH THE BROGUE.

A MINER’S REMINISCENCE.

Down by the gulch, where the pickaxe’s ringing
Never struck chords with the stream’s smothered singing--
For we had dammed its bright ardor to sloth:
Dammed it with claybanks and damned it with oath--
Curses in Mexican, curses in Dutch,
Curses in purest American; such
Polyglot blasphemy didn’t leave much
Room for the rest of the languages--there,
Down by that gulch, where all speech seemed one swear,
Naught but profanity ever in vogue,
Wandered one morning a priest with a brogue.

Also a smile. Now no mortal knows whether
God has ordained they should travel together,
But if in tongue Erin’s music you trace,
Bet Erin’s sunshine peeps out in the face.
Anyhow, Father McCabe had ’em both,
Sunshine and harmony--natural growth.
While the air trembled with half-suppressed oath,
Right down among us he stepped: all the while
Feeling his way, as it were, with his smile,
And when that staggered the obstinate rogue,
Knocking him head over heels with his brogue.

Inside a fortnight the brown-throated robins
Perched undismayed just in front of our cabins;
Sang at our windows for all they were worth--
Lucifer didn’t own all of the earth!
Pistols grew rusty, and whiskey seemed sour;
Nobody hunted the right or left bower;
Deserts put verdure on--one little flower
Bloomed in a niche of the rock. At its root,
Erstwhile undreamt of, lay rich golden fruit!
Yes; we struck gold. Arrah, Luck’s _thurrum pogue_[L]
Couldn’t go back on a priest with the brogue!

ARAB WAR SONG.

Allah, il Allah! the infidel’s doom
Knells through the desert from rescued Khartoum.
The blood of the Giaour is encrusting our swords,
And the vultures encircle his perishing hordes.
The gleam of our banners, the blaze of our spears,
Have blanched the black heart of the pale-face with fears.
How he reels, how he staggers in agony back!
Spur, sons of the desert, swift, swift on his track!

The dwellers in cities may quake at his frown,
When his fireships fling ruin and death on their town,
But the hearts of the tribesmen are fearless and free
As the winds of the desert or waves of the sea;
And their valor will scatter his merciless bands
As the fiery sirocco whirls broadcast our sands,
Their fury will break on his terrified host
With the strength of the tempest that lashes our coast.

Poor, pitiful fool! in his arrogant pride
He would chain the tornadó and fetter the tide;
He has tempted our wrath, and he trembles aghast
As bursts on his legions the death-dealing blast;
And, shattered in fragments, his gaudy array
Is melting before our wild charges in spray;
Around him destruction in lurid cloud rolls,
And Eblis is yawning for infidel souls!

Allah, il Allah! for God and the right,
Press on, lance and spear, to the glorious fight;
Though our life-blood in torrents should crimson our plains,
Better freedom in death than existence in chains.
On, lions of Islam, the wolves are afraid,
See, see, how they shrink from your conquering blade!
Strike swiftly, and spare not--yon turbanless crowd
Sought our desert for conquest to find it their shroud.

HOBBIES IN OUR BLOCK.

If every madman, and monomaniac, every idiot and imbecile in our block were to be transplanted to-morrow, what a lot of room would be left, and what a howling wilderness the place would become! I don’t know a completely, take him all round sort of a sensible man in the community. Every one of my acquaintances has some ridiculous hobby. There’s Smith. His failing is dogs. He has a miniature Kennel Club show up at his place. He has such a multitude of canine live-stock that he has to have them entered in a ledger, and he calls over the muster-roll every night to see that none of his barks have steered their course to other ports. He has lost all his friends through his hobby. When a fellow sheds his gore at the knocker, owing to the attentions of a bulldog with powerful jaws; and when he loses a square foot of his trousers in the lobby through the inquiring nature of a mastiff; and when he is brought to bay at the parlor door by a ferocious bloodhound that seems inclined to take an evening meal off him; and when he is transformed into a statue of adamant in his seat by the consciousness that there are half a dozen variegated specimens of fighting-dogs merely waiting a movement from him as a signal to chaw him up--under such circumstances one don’t feel inclined to take advantage of Smith’s hospitality too often.

Brown’s weakness is flowers. Brown is always handicapped in the race of life by a desire to linger on the wayside and breathe the fragrance of the lily and the rose, the daffadowndilly, and the potato blossom. You never meet Brown but he wants you to inhale the perfume of some horticultural wonder or other. The last time I met him he wanted me to envelop my senses with the heavenly odor of some infernal tulip he had with him. There was one of the most energetic bees I ever encountered hidden away in its petals. To gratify Brown I took a ten-horse-power sniff. I never smelt anything like it before. I carried my nose about in a sling for a fortnight afterwards.

Johnson’s hobby is old porcelain. His delirious desire to indulge in all kinds of ancient crockery, broken earthen-ware, blue-moulded slop-basins, and cracked washing-mugs has so affected his brain that he believes himself a Dresden china jug, and is frightened out of his life that he may be smashed. He’s afraid to shake hands with anybody, lest his handle might be broken; he speaks in a whisper, for fear of injuring his spout; and he is in such dread of being cracked that it takes him half an hour to sit down.

But Robinson, next door, is the worst case I know. His mental contortion is due to an insane desire to collect foreign postage stamps. He has carried his mania to a miraculous extent. I have known him to go down in a coal-mine to secure a rare specimen from a collier; he has been up in a balloon to coax a scarce sort of stamp out of the aeronaut, and he would have pitched him overboard if he hadn’t promised to turn it up; he has changed his religion half a dozen times to get round persons that he thought could contribute to his album; and on one occasion, when another crazy collector called on him in the middle of the night with a hundred or so of rare, unused stamps, as he couldn’t find the matches, and didn’t know where he had hung his pants, he just gummed the stamps round about his noble figure, and went to bed rejoicing. Unluckily, the mucilage of that distant shore, whose fatal postage stamps added a picturesque variety to his unadorned appearance which it had lacked before--that mucilage was of a diabolical stickiness, and after a week’s sponging and fingering, and disposing himself in a series of striking attitudes over the spout of a kettle, he found that he couldn’t improve his new costume without destroying its component parts, so he has travelled the dull journey of every-day life since with a kaleidoscopic arrangement of postage stamps attached to his hide, and a knowledge that he will be well worth skinning when he pegs out. It is inconvenient not to be in a position to exhibit his entire assortment to his friends. With some intimate acquaintances he can be confidential, and after going over his half-dozen ordinary albums it is really magnificent to be able to peel off the garb of civilization and invite inspection of his remaining treasures. But to most enthusiasts in the philatelic line he can only drop mysterious hints of what he could show them if the customs of the country permitted its costumes to be more scanty.

NOT A JOHN L. SULLIVAN.

I have never taken any interest in pugilism since my schoolboy days.

I studied it once then, with highly unsatisfactory results.

There was a boy called Bill at the school where I imbibed my knowledge, who was the bane of my existence. He used to take liberties with my marbles, and make free with my pegtops, and fly his kites with my string, and knock me down and sit on me when I remonstrated.

I thirsted for his blood.

I brought my father’s bulldog to take my part in a quarrel. It took my part--in fact, it took several parts of me.

I summoned re-enforcements in the shape of my little brother. Bill piled my little brother on top of me, and wanted more of the family to complete the structure.

Then I vowed that I would be avenged, and bought a sixpenny hand-book of boxing, and went in for a study of that literary masterpiece. It was illustrated with striking diagrams. Figure 1,--the position. Figure 2,--one for his nob. Figure 3,--the body blow. Figure 4,--the return. Figure 5,--the upper cut. Figure 6,--the cross-counter.

I devoured the instructions, and I practised the attitudes for weeks, till I mastered both so completely that I was a walking encyclopedia of P. R. theory, and I had only to be asked for Figure 1, or 3, or 4, or whatever I was desired, and I posed so statuesquely correct that I could have been photographed to illustrate “Fistiana.”

But I held my secret, and bided my time, and submitted to Bill’s insults with the glowing consciousness of approaching triumph, while I developed my newly acquired science in my bedroom on the pillows, and administered “one-two’s” in the ribs to the hair mattress, and “propped” the bolsters, and sparred at my shadow on the wall, and showered rib-benders and hot ’uns in the bread-basket on imaginary Bills till I felt like a conquering hero.

At last I decided that the hour of Fate had struck; the supreme moment had arrived for squelching Bill; and one day, when he had helped himself to my lunch, and grumbled at its scantity, I invited him to accompany me when school was over to a sequestered vale, where I might punch his head.

He came.

I gave my hand-book to my brother Joe, and told him to sing out the proper figures for the various stages of the battle.

I made all my preparations in the orthodox way. I threw my cap into the improvised ring, tied a handkerchief for a belt round my waist, and wanted to shake hands _a la_ Sullivan and Kilrain, but Bill declined.

Then I struck Figure 1, the position, and Bill struck another figure--which happened to be me.

“Figure 2,” shouted Joe, “one for his nob.” I made some mistake in this, because it resulted in two or three for _my_ nob, and while I was trying to get my head under my arms, out of the road, “Figure 3,” yelled Joe, “the body blow!” but that infernal Bill didn’t fight according to the regulations at all; for before I got Figure 3 into operation, something came bang against my teeth, and I tried to dig my grave in the ground with the back of my head.

I wanted to consider the situation a little longer when they called “Time,” but Joe whispered that Figure 4 was sure to fetch him. All I had to do was to wait till he let out, and then, parrying the blow with my left, send the right into his potato trap, and settle him. Well, Bill soon let out, and Joe screeched “Figure 4!” and I don’t know where I sent my right, but my nose encountered both his fists one after the other in a way that wasn’t in the book at all, and when Joe roared “Figure 5, try 5!” I could only gasp--“He won’t let me,” before there was an earthquake somewhere, and I was thrown three or four yards away, and found myself trying to swallow all my front teeth.

I was so disgusted that when they called “Time” again, I wouldn’t listen to the voice of the tempters, and wanted to go to sleep on the green sward, and when Joe came and wished me to illustrate a few more diagrams, I could have poisoned him. I don’t believe in the manly art.

THE LINGUIST OF THE LIFFEY.

[Among the many “learned” opponents of Home Rule in Ireland a few
years ago, was one somewhat famous professor of Trinity College,
who boasted among his other attainments an unlimited knowledge of
all Oriental languages, living and dead. An irreverent wag of a
student carefully copied the inscription on a tea-chest, and
bringing it to the loyal professor assured him it was a letter from
a Chinese mandarin on the Irish question, and that a translation of
it for the Tory papers would be of absorbing interest in that
crucial hour. The task proved too much for Polyglot. The tea-chest
knocked him out in one short round.]

There once was a doctor of famed T. C. D.--
Dr. Blank we shall call him--a Crichton was he;
Not a science or language earth ever has known
But he’d mastered so well he could call them his own--
Astronomy, Chemistry, Botany--these
Were trifles he’d learned in his moments of ease;
Mathematics, Mechanics, Geology, Law,
Theology, Medicine, Strategy--pshaw!
They all were mere flea-bites to that massive mind
Which left intellects minor some eras behind.
’Twas in linguistic lore that he dazzled the most
The Dons of the College--our doctor could boast
An intimate knowledge of every tongue
Ever written, or printed, or spoken or sung.
In the purest of Attic he silenced a Greek;
For hours to Ojibbeway chiefs he would speak;
A Zulu, whom accident brought to our shore,
Heard him preach in Zulost, and was dumb evermore;
He converted a Choctaw, in purest Choctese;
Made a Mandarin weep at his flowing Chinese;
In Turkish persuaded a Bashi-Bazouk;
In Hindoostanee showed a Sikh how to cook;
Taught quadratic equations in Welsh to a goat,
And none of the consonants stuck in his throat.
If he failed to translate, or translated all wrong,
The Chinese inscribed on a chest of Souchong,
Not his be the blame--no, the odium must rest,
On the printer or reader who muddled that chest;
Had the text been entire he had read it with ease,
But he wasn’t prepared for an “out” in Chinese.

A WINDY DAY AT CABRA.

I would sooner be consigned to Mountjoy Prison for eighteen months under the Coercion Act than spend another windy day in that Dublin suburb so dear to Castle pensioners and hangers-on, Cabra. A friend of mine hangs up his hat permanently in that neighborhood. He uses a hat-stand for that purpose, but there are occasional perfumes floating round there that would accommodate a fireman’s helmet. My friend’s hearth and home are in the vicinity of a plot of waste ground, the property of the executors of a deceased alderman; and if the bones of the departed civic dignitary were laid in that promiscuous waste, and there was a conspiracy to bury them fathoms deep from future discovery, it could not be carried out more vigorously and more enthusiastically. I once passed a few hours with my unfortunate acquaintance. I had a full view from his drawing-room window of the interesting ceremonies of the day. I had barely taken my seat when a picturesque procession of farm carts, donkey wagons, wheelbarrows, and unattached scavengers hove in sight. Then a red rubbish rover deposited alongside of this offensive breastwork a miscellaneous collection of decayed cabbage leaves, cooked and uncooked, a mixture of mashed turnips and raw turnip peeling, potatoes in various stages of disease and digestion, and a heterogeneous compound of varied articles of food, which even a provincial editor would decline with thanks. After this a wheelbarrow wanderer shot in the ravine between the two mortifying mounds a specially assorted stock of disreputable rags and broken bottles, with two dead cats and a vivisected fox terrier to guard the pass. And then all round the rambling refuse-rangers commenced to add fresh varieties to the dirty diversity, and new scents to the odoriferous ozone. This went on for three or four hours, the kaleidoscope of contamination changing with the arrival of every contingent of contagion. I felt for my friend, but when I started homewards in the dusk I felt worse for myself. A gale had arisen of such stupendous force that I had to open my mouth sideways to speak, for fear of being blown inside out, and even then the wind whistled through the irregularities in my teeth like an atmospheric orchestra. My hat was blown off, and when I recovered it there were ten pounds of clay, a few dozen broken corks, the skeleton of a pig’s head, and a jagged chimney pot (which nearly cut my thumb off) in it, and it was enwreathed in a garland of turnip-tops and cauliflower that smelt of anything but their native fields. As I opened my lips to utter sage reflections on the situation, a sudden gust banged a dilapidated Champion into my mouth, and I had to dig it out with my penknife. I came home with a multitude of unknown tastes in my palate, that cayenne pepper, salt, mustard, vinegar, and John Jameson’s finest distillation, taken in large doses at irregular but frequent intervals for weeks, failed to eradicate; and such a numerous and variegated selection of smells that I failed to count them all and was unable to distinguish one-third of the number. It would take Faraday’s laboratory to disinfect my collar. Imagine what my top-coat was like!

PEGGY O’SHEA.

AN IRISH SERENADE.

The pale moon is beaming,
The bright stars are gleaming.
Awake from thy dreaming,
Acushla, arise!
For sure the moon’s light, dear,
Though vivid an’ bright, dear,
Is but darkest night, dear,
Compared with your eyes.
Glimmerin’,
Shimmerin’,
Down in the river there,
Dancin’ and glancin’ and prancin’ away,
See how the pale moonbeams sparkle an’ quiver there,
Rise and eclipse them, sweet Peggy O’Shea!

See, your own thrue love
Is waitin’ for you, love,
So waken anew, love,
An’ gladden my sight!
Don’t keep me quakin’ here,
Freezin’ an’ achin’ here,
Trimblin’ an’ shakin’ here,
All the long night;
Quiverin’,
Shiverin’,
Faith it’s Decimber, dear,
Freezes me, teases me--darlin’ don’t stay;
Troth! this cowld night for a year I’ll remimber, dear,
For I’m all frost-bitten, Peggy O’Shea!

This morn had you been, love,
With me, you’d have seen, love,
A new dress of green, love,
I bought--for, you mind,
But last week you said, dear,
You hated the red, dear,
So get out of bed, dear,
An’ let down the blind!
Shyly,
Slyly,
Creep to the window now,
Sure, love, your love cannot say nay,
Whin you behold me, devout as a Hindoo now,
Bent at your shrine, darlin’ Peggy O’Shea!

Why have you waited
So long, whin you stated
To me that you hated
The red of our foes?
While you are keepin’
Me here with your sleepin’
The color is creepin’
All over my nose!
Face it,
Chase it,
Meet it with bravery,
Fearless, peerless, rush to the fray.
The hue on my nose ripresints Saxon slavery,
Up for the green, then, sweet Peggy O’Shea!

Och, you are there now,
So purty and fair now,
I raley declare, now
I’m murthered outright;
My mouth seems like butter,
I hardly can mutter
A sintince, or utter
A word, love, to-night.
Thumpin’
An’ bumpin’
An’ jumpin’ an’ flutterin’,
Knockin’ an’ rockin’, my heart seems astray,
And, as I can’t spake, why, I’ll have to be st-st-stutterin’
How much I love you, sweet Peggy O’Shea!

THE BOSTON CARRIER’S PLAINT.

The summer sun, disgusted at some too-familiar cloud,
Had muffled up his brightness in a sort of misty shroud;
The sky o’ercast and leaden-hued, as if in angry pain,
Poured down upon our busy town huge tears of hissing rain.
Amid the crowds that hurried from the sloppy streets amain
Was one poor limping creature--the embodiment of pain.
His pale face, drawn and twisted in a multitude of ways,
Was really calculated quite to shock the public gaze;
His body was contorted; bent his back, and clenched each hand,
And his lips ejaculated words I could not understand;
Yet his phrases, I confess it, were not very transcendental,
For his adjectives, if forcible, were far from ornamental.

I questioned him--this blighted one--I asked him what the reason
Of his sorrow, and his anger, and his language out of season;
And in such a tone he answered, that a Tartar savage prowling
Around the near environs would have thought a wolf was howling:--

“Don’t my uniform tell you that I
Am of the unfortunate band,
Whom you see day by day passing by,
Never pausing a moment to stand;
Who, in one perpetual round,
Forever are marching, until
It seems that while one of us stays overground
Fate ordains he shall never be still.

“‘Tis hard when the bright golden sun
Smiles out from a clear azure sky,
To set out on a pilgrimage ne’er to be done
Till his glory has gone and passed by.
And e’en along green country lanes,
’Mid the scent of the newly mown hay,
And a thousand gay birds chanting joyous refrains,
Who would care to be tramping all day?

“Then why do you wonder to hear
An unlucky sad mortal complain,
Who has walked through the Hub, all the day pretty near,
In this ne’er-ending, pitiless rain?
Or say, are you looking for smiles
From a fellow who feels on the rack,
After walking some twenty odd miles
On a path like a porcupine’s back?

“They say that the Muscovite knout,
On the back of a troublesome peasant,
When wielded by hands that are stout,
Is decidedly very unpleasant.
The rack and the thumb-screw, I’m told,
Caused aught but delightful sensations,
But what were their tortures of old,
Compared to our new innovations?

“No martyr that ever yet died
In those times that have long passed away,
Whether gibbeted, hanged, drowned, or fried,
Suffered more than I’ve suffered to-day.
My feet are denuded of skin,
My toes every one are disjointed,
For the soles of my boots are peculiarly thin,
And the most of our pavement is pointed!

“Aye, jagged, like the teeth of a saw,
Or the glass of a smashed window-pane,
Save where an occasional flaw
Leaves a hole in to gather the rain--”

Here my comrade gave vent to a shriek
That emptied a neighboring tavern,
He had planted one foot on a peak,
While the other was lost in a cavern!

Then his language assumed such a tone--
And one not by any means sweeter--
And he mixed up such adverbs with every groan
That they couldn’t be put into metre.
So thus my sad narrative ends,
As I left the poor tortured one raving,
And hoping the rest of his Post-office friends
Would survive Boston’s wonderful paving.

APROPOS OF THE CENSUS.

If they do not call for the census papers in our street soon, we shall have a revolution. The crisis has arrived in Ryan’s already. Mrs. Ryan’s mother came a day or two before the numbering of the people to assist Mrs. Ryan through a difficulty not altogether unconnected with the census. The enumerator hadn’t called for the paper on Tuesday last, and on that morning there was another visitor at Ryan’s. Mrs. Ryan and her mother insist that the latest comer must be added to the list. Ryan, who is conscientious to a decimal point, argues that the important personage in question has no moral right to figure in the population for another ten years. After an animated and personal discussion on this point, Ryan retired to his study, took out the census paper, and filled up the last column by appending to his sainted mother-in-law’s name the classical expression “idiot!” That lady got hold of the document later, and she filled up Ryan’s own blank with the declaration that he was a brute, blind, deaf, dumb, and a dangerous lunatic. Ryan secured the blue pages afterwards, and what pen-and-ink profanity he was guilty of will not be known until the collector comes round. We expect something rather lively on that occasion.

Brown has got his form filled up all right. There was a preliminary difficulty between himself and his better four-fifths as to which of them had the greater claim to be entitled “Head of the Family.” As she threatened to sit on him, if he resisted her mandate, and her sitting weight is two hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois, he consented to a compromise by which she appears as “Head of the Family,” and his dignity is maintained by the insertion of “Ditto, ditto,--occasionally.”

If Timmins’s paper be not called for soon he will occupy the abnormal position of being the husband of a lady as yet unborn. Their eldest is fifteen, and duly entered as of that age, yet Mrs. T. insisted on figuring as thirty, and to avoid hysterics Timmins consented to let her appear as of that matronly but not too far advanced period of adolescence. She has had charge of the sheet since, and when it was not called for on Monday she studied her charms in the mirror for an hour or so, and thought appearances justified her in knocking two years off her record. On Tuesday, a lady friend congratulated her on her youthful figure, and she abbreviated her years by half a decade. She has been at that column every day since, and by latest accounts was only two years ahead of her eldest born. In another week she should be fit for spoon and bottle-feeding.

The worst case of all, however, is that of poor Robinson. Robinson is the family man of our street. He has been adding to the population of it for a quarter of a century with a regularity that is inspiring. He is a commercial traveller, and he seldom returns from a lengthy journey without the expectation of an introduction to another of his name and lineage. He don’t know half his offspring. From the moment he turns the corner into our street on his return from a month’s absence he is the central figure of an imposing procession. A territorial army of young Robinsons surround him, climb on his shoulders, take up quarters in his arms, cling to his coat-tails, impede his footsteps, follow four deep in his wake, and make the welkin ring with filial expressions of welcome. He has shirked the fearful ordeal of reckoning his responsibilities until the fatal exigencies of the census have brought it home to him. The only occasions on which he has obtained a faint idea of his success as a father have been those momentous periods when the baptismal signboard of the latest Robinson has had to be hung out. “What shall we call sonny?” has whispered the joint shareholder in his live-stock. “Oh, John.” “But we’ve got John already.” “Oh, then, name him Peter or Theodore--Theodore sounds well with Robinson.” “But we have had Peter fifteen years, my dear, and it was only yesterday, you know, that we feared Theodore had the measles.” Then Robinson would became irritated. “Hang it,” he would exclaim, “do you think I am a Thom’s Directory, or an army list, or a dictionary of scriptural names? What name are you short of? Give him that.” Then Mrs. R. would begin the catalogue. “We have John, and Peter, and Theodore, and Joe’s with his aunt, and Tom’s at his grandmother’s, and there’s Philip, and James, and little Edmund, and--” Then Robinson would fly out with his fingers in his ears, and knock over two or three of the middle-sized ones in the lobby, and be followed by the screams of the smaller ones to the door, and meet some of the eldest “sparking” in the lane; and when he entered some refuge to drown reflection in a flowing bowl, he would hear one tall stripling whisper to another, “Here’s father,” and his end of the counter would be left deserted. It was too much to think of, and he didn’t, as a rule.

But he couldn’t escape the census. He was at home. His feelings as a father and his duty as head of the household demanded that that paper should be filled up. Anna Maria couldn’t assist--there was another Robinson _en route_. So he entered the parlor on Sunday night, and sent the housemaid round to summon the clan. They came--in twos, in threes, in fours, and the last batch was half a dozen. He gazed upon the throng, and as he traced his nose in this one, his mouth in that, and the cast in his eye leered at him all round the room from other eyes, he felt like Noah--only Noah would have been nowhere with an ark of the dimensions used at the time of the Flood. He commenced his enumeration, and before any appreciable diminution had been made in the numbers present by the retirement of those whose descriptive particulars had been entered, his form, with its fifteen spaces, pegged out. The room was still full. Two or three of the boys were playing leap-frog in one corner, a few girls were dressing and comparing dolls in another, the twins were fighting under the table, the youngest but two was struggling with the coal scuttle, and some of them hadn’t come home from church yet. Then Robinson felt the full extent of his marital liabilities, and he laughed. “Ha! ha!” he yelled. “What’s the use of this bit o’ paper? Send me a volume, four hundred pages, bound in morocco, forty names on a page! I’ll fill ’em up. Order up your whole staff of enumerators, two or three barrels of ink, and a goods train to carry out the returns. I’m ready. There’s Robinsons enough round to make a census of their own. Oh, let us be joyful!” Then he began to dance, sang “A father’s early love,” and went up-stairs to swallow the latest arrival. It’s a pity Robinson was at home this census time.

NEW ENGLAND’S MARKSMEN.

Rank on rank they march together,
Through the lanes and o’er the heather,
And the rhythmic ringing beat
Of their measured swinging feet
Music bears in martial tone
To the land they call their own.
Happy land that proudly boasts,
Not coerced, unwilling hosts,
But around her throne can feel
Hearts of oak and nerves of steel,
Hearts whose love no bribes retain,
Hands that never strike in vain.

Through the fields of yellow grain,
Through the woods of leafy green,
Here and there on many a plain,
Are their snowy targets seen;
And the mountains echo back
From their peaks the rifles’ crack.

Freedom knows how keen of eye,
Firm of nerve and quick of finger,
Are the marksmen brave who vie
In the skill they freely bring her.
Bunker Hill and Concord tell
They have won their laurels well.

And should war assail our shore,
Still to guard it ever ready
As their fathers were of yore.
Calm, yet eager, true and steady,
Are the loyal ranks that play
But at mimic strife to-day.

A MIXED ANTIQUARIAN.

They have high old times of it occasionally at the Royal Dublin Society rooms. For example, at a recent festive gathering Mr. William Smith, C. E., read an exciting essay on “The Manufacture of paper from molina cœrulea.” Then there was some light literature from Mr. W. E. Burton, F. R. A. S., who gave a paper on “A new form of micrometer for astronomical instruments.” After these two courses came dessert in the shape of a sweet thing from Dr. Leith Adams, F. R. S., about “Explorations in the bone cave of Ballynamintra.” I wanted to read a dozen pages of “Falconer’s Railway Guide,” but in the feverish state of excitement in which the audience were boiling over it was felt that the experiment might be dangerous. It might have led to revolution, and it wouldn’t be logical--or geological--to use the Ballynamintra bones for ammunition.

I always had a sneaking regard for these delicious scientific symposiums. I love to hear of the domestic arrangements of the gay ichthyosaurus, and to see dragged forth from the dark recesses of antiquity the private character (very shaky it was) of the lordly mastodon.

I once lectured myself on “Relics of the Pre-Glacial Period discovered during Excavations at Ballymacslughaun.” I got on very well for an hour or so. The bald-headed antiquarian who had excavated the relics had been kind enough to label them--“Tooth of an Irish Elk,” “Skull of a Land Agent of the Pliocene Era (dinged by rocks),” “Feeding-bottle of the Bone Age,” etc.