Part 11

Avenging, though dim, with the dust of inaction, And dinted and blunted through fraud and delay, With the hilt spoilt and scarred by the rude hands of faction, And the blade rusting slowly to useless decay, The swift sword of Erin, its temper unbroken, Leaped forth after years from its vain, idle shield, To smite to the earth the vile slander oft spoken, That true men e’er falter or brave spirits yield.

The hearts that had dared to disturb its long slumber, With resolute nerve, may be laid in the clay, But they woke from the harp-strings of Erin a number That throbs through the soul of the nation to-day. And be it in future for joy or for sorrow, To clothe her in glory or shroud her in pall, The tyrants of Ireland shall find from to-morrow The sweets of their empire embittered with gall.

CHRISTMAS DIRGE OF THE LONDON POLICE (1885).

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.