that, when Dr. Collier, a relative who had been away for some years,
returned to his native place and he failed to recognize him, the doctor
jocosely asked Mr. Gardiner to hum him “Harvey Duff,” as he was anxious
to master that national anthem. Before that disciple of Galen had time
to finish his request, he found himself battering the pavement with the
back of his head, one leg desperately striving to tie itself into a
knot, and the other hysterically pointing in the direction of the
harvest-moon, whilst the furious Gardiner was looking for a soft spot in
the surgeon’s body to bury his drawn sword-bayonet in.
In Kilmallock, County Limerick, on one occasion, a bright, curly-headed
little boy of the age of five years was marched into court under an
escort of one sub-inspector, two constables, and eight sub-constables,
and there and then solemnly charged with having intimidated the
aforesaid force of her Majesty’s defenders. It appeared that the small
and chubby criminal, on passing the barracks, had tried to whistle
something which the garrison imagined to be “Harvey Duff,” and before
the barefooted urchin could make his retreat, the sub-inspector’s
Napoleonic strategy, aided as it was by the marvellous discipline and
bulldog valor of his command, resulted in the capture of the infant,
without any serious loss to the loyal battalions. The five-year-old
rebel was bound over to keep the peace, so that the Kilmallock policemen
might not in future pace their dismal rounds with their hearts in their
mouths and their souls in their boots,--that is, if an Irish policeman
has either a heart or a soul. The popular belief is that they discard
both along with their civilian clothes.[A]
A few days afterwards, in the city of Limerick, an ardent wearer of the
dark-green uniform got a lift in the world, and gave an unique gymnastic
entertainment for the benefit of the citizens that has immortalized him
in the “City of the Violated Treaty,” through the same “Harvey Duff.” He
was passing by a lofty grain warehouse. In the topmost story a laborer
was industriously winding up by a crane sacks of corn which were
attached to the rope below by a fellow-workman. The sub-constable,
pausing to survey the operations, was horror-stricken to hear the man
aloft enlivening his toil by the unmistakable accompaniment of the
atrocious “Harvey Duff.” Fired with heroic zeal, he determined to
capture the sacrilegious miscreant and silence his seditious solo.
Seizing the corn-porter below, he threatened him with the direst
penalties of the law if by signal or shout he warned his musical comrade
of his impending fate. Then, when the rope next descended, that
strategic sub fastened it round his waist, gave the signal “all right,”
and the operatic minstrel began to wind up, not a cargo of grain, but an
avenging angel with belt and tunic. How Mephistopheles below told
Orpheus above of his approaching danger I know not; but when the
passionate peeler was elevated some thirty feet from Mother Earth the
ascent suddenly ceased, and there he was left suspended in mid-air,
twirling and twisting, and swinging and gyrating, and flinging out upon
the passing breeze a cloud of official profanity that made the
atmosphere lurid. His promotion lasted for fully half an hour, and, when
the arrival of re-enforcements released him from his aerial bondage, the
crowd beneath, who had been enjoying his acrobatic feats, and wondering
at his ornamental objurgations, thought it better to dissolve before he
could recover his breath.
I am not aware whether “Harvey Duff” had ever any words attached to its
obnoxious measure, but I think it would be a pity not to convey the
ideas of the Royal Irish concerning the tune in imperishable verse, and
it is with feelings of profound sympathy I dedicate the following lines
to that immaculate body:--
“HARVEY DUFF.”
My load of woes is hard to bear,
I’m losing flesh with dark despair,
And the top of my head is so awfully bare
It isn’t worth while to dye my hair.
Would you the cause be after knowing
That makes me the baldest peeler going,
That has changed my sweet tones into accents gruff?
’Tis a horrible tune they call “Harvey Duff.”
Oh, “Harvey Duff!” oh, “Harvey Duff!”
If I’ve not heard you often enough,
May a Land League convention dance jigs on my buff,
And keep time to the music of “Harvey Duff!”
I was once with a bailiff serving writs,
My skull was cracked to spoil my wits,
For the bailiff escaped in the darkness dim,
And the mob malafoostered me for him.
But the case that circles my brain is thick,
It cannot be damaged by stone or stick,
And I’d rather submit to such treatment rough
Than be safe to the chorus of “Harvey Duff!”
Oh, “Harvey Duff!” oh, “Harvey Duff!”
Should I meet your composer some day in Bruff,
My bayonet into him with pleasure I’ll stuff
Till he’ll wish he had never learnt “Harvey Duff.”
When duty has called me miles away,
Though hungry and cold, I must needs obey,
And there wasn’t a Christian of either sex
Would give me a sandwich or pint of X.
I couldn’t coax dry bread and water
From father or son, from mother or daughter,
But I always could reckon on more than enough
Of that kind of refreshment called “Harvey Duff!”
Oh, “Harvey Duff!” oh, “Harvey Duff!”
Of you I get more than _quantum suff_,
And would to the Lord I could collar the muff
Who invented that blasphemous “Harvey Duff!”
I’m so destroyed I wouldn’t care
To go alone to rebel Clare,
And with a reckless spirit dare
To take a farm that’s vacant there.
I know the peasants bold would scatter
My four bones to the wind--no matter;
They’d wake me decent--no heart so tough
As to mock a dead peeler with “Harvey Duff!”
Oh, “Harvey Duff!” oh, “Harvey Duff!”
I wipe my eyes upon my cuff,
As I think that my soul will depart in a huff
To the requiem anthem of “Harvey Duff!”
A SEDITIOUS SLIDE.
We learn from a special despatch which has been cabled via Shanghai and
Yokohama to Britain’s representatives abroad that the demon of anarchy
has again broke loose in Ireland, that the flood-gates of sedition have
been once more thrown open, and the pestilential torrents of a whole lot
of things are deluging society. We feel that a Webster’s Unabridged
Dictionary and a very fair acquaintanceship with the slang of nearly
thirty States are utterly inadequate to express our tumultuous thoughts
on reading the following touching epistle from Cornet Gadfly, who is at
present attached to the suite of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland:--
There is some dark plot afoot here to destroy the peace of mind and
happiness of her Majesty’s defenders.
I was wending my cheerful way last evening toward my temporary lodgings
in the bosom of that highly interesting family, the Higginses, who never
did anything so low or ignoble as to _work_ for their country, and are,
consequently, enjoying the reward of their virtue, in the shape of a big
pension from a grateful government. I was whistling contentedly the
refrain of England’s “Marseillaise,” “We don’t want to fight, but by
jingo when we do!”
On turning the corner of Rutland Square, my legs evinced a sudden and
unexpected interest in the atmospheric and astronomic condition of the
heavens, for I found myself progressing homeward at the rate of twenty
miles an hour on the back of my head, with one foot pointing
triumphantly to Saturn, and the other indicating the whereabouts of the
Milky Way.
Having satisfied myself that my bodily inversion was not the result of
an earthquake, I wound myself up at the Rotunda railings, ejected a few
front teeth and some powerful ejaculations, and surveyed the position.
I had come to grief on a slide some eighteen inches wide and about forty
feet in length. The mutinous, seditious, rebellious, and barbarous
juvenile population of that ward must have been nearly a week improving
that slide, until it was so slippery that a bucket of pitch couldn’t
have stuck on it, and a coating of Dublin mud as adhesive as a dish of
Boston baked beans, attached to my boot soles, afforded no protection to
either person or property. The whole fiendish arrangement must have been
organized with devilish ingenuity by either a Fenian engineer or a
National League architect. Rage, anguish, revenge, agony, surged through
my bosom as I contemplated the icy snare.
But it is strange how the misfortunes of others reconcile us to our
own. In this instance, balm was poured upon the troubled waters of my
soul and my head was metaphorically bandaged and plastered as I saw
approaching the fatal spot, Ensign Wilson of the Lancers, and the fair
Araminta Higgins.
They were mashing.
He, in all the pristine glory of a new tunic and a re-dyed sash,
preserved the best traditions of the British uniform by the ardor of his
suit. He was passionate, eloquent, effusive; she was bashful, simpering,
and lackadaisical, as became a pensioned Higgins.
“Araminta,” he murmured softly, “believe no base calumnies. I am as true
to thee as--as--as thy father to his pension or the needle to the pole.
I am thine--thine only. No power on earth can sever us.”
At this moment he shot off suddenly, leaving his hat at the lady’s feet
and slinging his umbrella out into the roadway. A few minutes afterward
a dejected and dilapidated British officer was indulging in profane
observations of a remarkably ornamental and original description as he
supported himself against a friendly lamp-post, while the dormant Irish
blood in the fickle Araminta asserted itself through the medium of a
coarse laugh.
They vanished in the darkness, but I do not think the enamored ensign
spooned any more that night. Barely had they disappeared, when two
prominent members of the Constitutional Club crossed the street from the
direction of the house of a certain eminent judge. They were
energetically discussing the National League campaign in Ulster. They
neared the precipice--I mean the slide.
“This Parnellite invasion will fail--utterly fail--if we remain firm,”
said the taller of the two, Col. K--H--. “Unity and perseverance must be
our watchwords. United we stand--”
He did not finish the sentence, for they became divided, and his head
rang out a hollow note of defiance to the breeze. However, despite his
desire for unity, the Tory victim did not remain long rooted to the
soil, but made tracks for the nearest saloon to recuperate his exhausted
energies.
The next visitor to the insurrectionary skating-rink was a well-known
attorney, who is at the present moment engaged in an abortive effort to
discover an Irish constituency that will have him at any price. Mr. N.
looked an attorney in every inch. You could read six-and-eight pence in
every wrinkle of his rugged countenance; his protruding coat-tails were
veritable embodiments of _fieri-facias_; his stiff, angular collar had
the disagreeable similitude of a bill of costs, and the leather bag he
carried in his hand was a positive arsenal of writs and decrees and
processes. I felt horror-stricken as I saw this legal luminary stepping
briskly to destruction.
Just as he reached one end of the glassy line a little milliner with a
bandbox and a brown-paper parcel stepped upon the other.
They had never met before, but the instant their feet touched that
atrocious slide they darted together with the enthusiasm of old lovers.
Then there was a collision, and a confused combination of legal
documents and straw bonnet, proceedings in bankruptcy and colored
ribbons, opinions of counsel and hairpins; and when the law adviser got
home he found in his bag an artificial bang where he had been looking
for the draft of a will, and that poor little milliner’s duck of a
bonnet had vanished out of her ruined bandbox, while its place was
filled with a horrible notice to claimants and incumbrancers.
When the law and the lady had gone from my gaze the pantomime was
continued by new artists. A poor-law guardian, who had voted against the
North Dublin Union adopting the laborers’ act, was explaining his
reasons therefor, and appealed to his auditor thus: “You would have done
the same yourself in my position. Put yourself in my place.”
And away he went, express speed, on his hands and knees, till he was
brought to a stop by his head thundering on a policeman’s belt. Then the
policeman sat on top of him, and a postman threw a double somersault
over the pair, and the band of the Coldstream Guards marching smartly
round the corner got mixed up with them, and it wasn’t till the
policeman had half swallowed the trombone, and the poor-law guardian had
got the double bass round his neck for a collar, and the postman had
been engulfed in the big drum that order was restored, and
constitutional peace triumphed once more over revolutionary chaos.
But I ask the civilized and great British Empire, how much longer are we
going to tolerate a state of society which permits slides and pitfalls
and chasms to be laid for loyal feet, and bruised heads, smashed ribs,
and pulverized hip bones to bring woe and desolation to loyal homes?
It’s awful!
IVAN PETROKOFFSKY.
Ivan Petrokoffsky, of the 21st Division
Of the Army of the Danube, is a private--nothing more;
And nobody expects of him to form a wise decision
On the diplomatic reasons that have mobilized his corps.
He is rather dull and stupid, and not given much to reading,
And even when he has a thought his words are few and rude;
So when summoned to his sotnia, about that same proceeding
Rough Ivan’s stray ideas were most miserably crude.
But he heard his colonel reading out the regimental order,
Which explains in glowing language why the Russians go to war;
And he holds some dim idea that he’s on the Turkish border,
“For the glory of the Empire and the honor of the Czar!”
Ivan Petrokoffsky is a little tender-hearted--
His feelings, for a private, are completely out of place--
And when from wife and infant, with slow, lingering steps he parted,
No heroic agitation was depicted on his face.
It was well for foolish Ivan that his colonel had not found him,
When the marching order reached him at his home that bitter day,
When the younger Ivan’s chubby little arms were folded round him,
And tearful Mistress Ivan gave her tongue unbounded sway.
There were murmurs of rebellion in that quiet Volga village
(So devoid of patriotic aspirations women are),
When Ivan and his comrades left for scenes of blood and pillage,
“For the glory of the Empire and the honor of the Czar!”
Ivan Petrokoffsky, of the 21st Division
Of the Army of the Danube, is not easy in his mind,
For within the deep recesses of his heart is a suspicion
He has wept farewell forever to the loved ones left behind.
In cruel dreams he sees himself, a shapeless mass and gory,
By the rolling Danube lying, with his purple life-stream spent,
And he has not such a keen appreciation of the glory
Of dying for his country to be happy or content.
He has seen his comrades falling round, all mangled, torn, and bleeding,
And their cries were not of triumph, but of homes and kindred far,
While little recked the vultures, on the gray-robed bodies feeding,
Of “the glory of the Empire or the honor of the Czar!”
THE EMPEROR’S RING.
The stillness of death broods o’er valley and mountain,
The snow lies below like a funeral shroud;
The clutch of the ice chokes the song of the fountain;
Starry eyes from the skies dimly gleam through each cloud;
When, hark! on the hard, frozen earth strikes the thunder
Of fast-falling hoof-beats with sonorous sound,
Scared villagers waken in somnolent wonder,
The sentinel checks his monotonous round.
Ho! Governor, let not thy dreamings encumber
With pause the swift flight of yon messenger’s wing,
For fatal the stay thou wouldst cause by thy slumber,
The horseman who rides with the Emperor’s ring.
Fresh horse and new pistols--some phrases of warning,
Few and brief, to the chief, and the fort is behind,
And away in the gray of the slow-dawning morning
Flies his steed with the speed of the fierce northern wind.
Out, out through the forests--on, on o’er the meadows,
While castle and cabin and hamlet and town
Rise and fall, come and go, past his vision like shadows.
With white snowy robes over bosoms of brown,
The woodcutter leaps from his path with a shiver;
To their babes, in mute terror, the pale mothers cling;
And the gray-coated hero salutes with a quiver
The ominous flash of the Emperor’s ring.
Some guess, but none question, the message he carries,
All divine by the sign ’tis of life or of death;
And woe to the wretch through whose folly he tarries;
Better Fate, with grim hate, strangled out his first breath,
For earth has no cavern to shield and defend him,
Nor ocean a sheltering island so far
As to hide from the scourge that will torture and rend him,
Whose blunder or crime has enraged the White Czar.
So serf and proud baron, so moujik and banker
Keep aside, unless aid to his mission you bring.
Speed him on, and rejoice when you earn not the rancor
Of one who bears with him the Emperor’s ring.
We Russians are brave, but we only are human;
We cower at a power it is death to offend,
Even Ivan, the bear-killer, shrinks like a woman
From frown of a clown with Alexis as friend.
The wolves on our steppes are a thousand times bolder;
Peer and peasant alike for their banquets they claim;
The blood in yon courtier’s veins may be colder
Than the serfs, but ’twill serve for their feast all the same.
Out there in the solitude, silent and lonely,
These prowlers of night know but Hunger as king.
And the Cossacks may find of that messenger only
A few whitened bones and the Emperor’s ring.
BLACK LORIS.
Spurs jingle and lances shine;
A hundred brave horsemen in line;
Gay voices ring as they merrily sing,
For why should true hearts repine?
The pathway is level and balmy the air,
Their bosoms unruffled by shadow of care;
The sun has but reached its meridian height,
“Twenty versts farther on we shall slumber to-night.”
When, crash! from the thickets that border the way,
Bursts a hail-storm of bullets in death-dealing spray;
In front a wall rises of turban-crowned foes,
And half of the sotnia fall ’neath their blows.
But still with teeth set, and a joyous hurrah,
With lances at rest and a cheer for the Czar,
Charge fifty brave horsemen in line!
Oh, fatal the rifle’s crack!
Ten heroes fight back to back,
And each lance-thrust brings down in the dust
A wolf from the howling pack.
How the yelping curs in myriads swarm!
Ten new foes rise from each prostrate form,
They drop from the trees, they spring from the ground,
Till a blaze of scimetars flashes around.
The ten are scattered; they seem to be
Like derelict spars in an angry sea.
But never a Cossack was known to yield
While his arm a lance or sabre could wield.
Oh, weep their valor by distant Don,
The waves are engulphing them one by one!
But two remain back to back!
His comrade sinks down with a groan--
Black Loris is fighting alone,
His eyeballs glazed and his senses dazed,
And his arms as heavy as stone.
“Surrender!” a hundred harsh voices demand,
For answer he sabres the chief of the band.
But his arm is shivered in twain--he feels
The earth swim round him--he gasps, he reels,
And gleam on his vision old scenes afar,
As he gasps in a dream a last cheer for the Czar--
Was it echo, that sonorous answering peal?
No, no! there’s a rattle of hoof and of steel!
Black Loris is not alone!
No tears for the ninety-nine,
The nation’s heart is their shrine;
But glory’s bays and the Emperor’s praise
For the one man left of the line!
The Don’s deep waters will long be dried,
And stemmed the flow of the Ural’s tide,
The strength and glory of Russia depart,
And the Cossack know cowardice reign in his heart,
Ere the Muscovite legions shall cease to tell
Of dashing Loris who fought so well,
Whose comrades tore him from out the grave,
Whose medal the Emperor’s own hands gave.
And for years to come, when trotting along
Ural and Don, men will sing this song--
“The One and the Ninety-Nine!”
WHO SHOT PHLYNN’S HAT?
I.
Mr. Phineas Phlynn, J. P., was a few years ago the agent upon the Irish
estates of that erratic and eccentric, but excitable and energetic
nobleman, Lord Oglemore. If Mr. Phlynn no longer performs the onerous
functions of that office, it is because he has taken to a far-off and
less humid sphere his various and variegated vices, and has probably by
his importation into a remarkably torrid zone added another to the
abundant torments of Pandemonium. In 1879, however, Mr. Phlynn, much to
his own satisfaction, but a great deal more to the misery of his
neighbors, was still in the flesh. Mr. Phlynn was by no means a happy
man. His commission for collecting the rents of his absentee master was
only a paltry shilling in the pound, and as Lord Oglemore’s landed
property amounted to but a few thousand acres, and Mr. Phlynn’s habits
included an addiction to French wines and Irish whiskey, a decided
inclination to woo Dame Fortune by speculations on the turf and ventures
at the roulette table, and an amorous disposition which plunged him into
frequent financial scrapes, he felt that he must wring a bigger
percentage out of his employer and increase his emoluments.
But how was it to be done?
He couldn’t raise the rents. They were so high already that the tenantry
had some difficulty in reaching them, and were beginning to indulge in
mutinous murmurs about abatements and reductions and re-adjustments, and
the other pestilential, communistic, and diabolical ideas of the Land
League. Phineas had been complaining for months to his noble master
about the danger and difficulties of his post, surrounded, as he
described himself, by hosts of murderous assassins who thirsted for his
gore and wanted to perforate his magisterial hide with surreptitious
bullets; and Phineas had strongly hinted that his accumulated risks
deserved a commensurate reward in the shape of an additional income. But
the only consolation Lord Oglemore vouchsafed was an assurance to Mr.
Phlynn that if those “demmed Irish rascals” should make his carcass a
repository for any appreciable quantity of lead, the beggars should have
their rents raised fifty per cent. all around. This didn’t console
Phineas worth a cent, for he felt that if he were laid to rest with his
fathers with a few pounds of scrap iron in his manly bosom, he couldn’t
enjoy the extra commission on the fifty per cent. rise in any exuberant
degree. Besides, the levity of his lordship’s remarks induced the agent
to guess that that rather wide-awake peer doubted his dismal
forebodings. So Phineas resolved that he would bring matters to a
crisis. There should be an outrage--a sanguinary, blood-curdling
outrage, that would prove to the unbelieving Oglemore that his agent
carried his life in his hand, and was certainly entitled to at least
eighteen pence in each pound of the revenue he gathered in perpetual
peril.
II.
There was an outrage. As none of the tenantry had the most remote notion
of shooting Mr. Phlynn, Mr. Phlynn shot himself--at least, he shot his
own hat. There were many obvious advantages in Phineas taking this
horrible task upon himself. Of course, the chief of these was the fact
that if any desperate tenant had sought to make a target of Mr. Phlynn’s
hat, he wouldn’t have paused to ascertain whether Mr. Phlynn’s head was
in it or not--really, he might have preferred that the hat should be so
tenanted. A circumstance of that sort would have been decidedly
inconvenient. With Mr. Phlynn as the assailant of his own hat, no such
objectionable mistake was possible. Mr. Phlynn carefully placed the hat
on the roadside between his own residence and the nearest police
barrack, and fired at it twice. One ball ripped the front rim off and
the other tore a hole in the crown. Then carefully replacing his
dilapidated head-gear upon his undisturbed cranium, he flung his
revolver into the adjacent ditch and rushed breathless into the presence
of the sub-inspector in the police barrack aforementioned, and poured
into the astonished ears of that horrified luminary a ghastly story of
his terrible encounter with a band of four masked miscreants, who had
fired at least a dozen times at him, two balls actually grazing his
head, in proof of which, behold the battered hat!
III.