Are strains of mirth and flashing light,
The sheen of satin, gleaming gems
In scores of priceless diadems;
These are the butterflies, the drones,
Vampires who feed on blood and bones.
Ah, cruel parasites, beware,
One victim of your wrong is there.
The London skies are black with cloud
The earth enwrapt in night’s dark shroud,
As by the despot’s citadel
A hand from Shannon fires the shell.
England, to thee and thine belongs
The memory of uncounted wrongs
That, multiplied through all the years,
Have dried the fount of Ireland’s tears.
Thy fate is sealed, thy knell has tolled,
Not thrice the sum of thrice thy gold
Can turn the wrath thou hast defied
Of hearts like those from Shannon’s side.
Thy future sky is overcast,
Thy halcyon days forever past,
Earthquake and storm shall overwhelm
Thy towers and fanes, thy laws and realm.
AVENGING, THOUGH DIM (1798).
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.
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.