Part 2

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

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

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

TAMING A TIGER.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE LORD OF KENMARE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

RYAN’S REVENGE.

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

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

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

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

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

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