Part 12

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.