To this day, letters addressed to Mr. Murphy are occasionally picked up a thousand leagues from land, on the stormy ocean, and whenever Sir William Vernon Harcourt reads of such a discovery he disappears for a week, and paragraphs appear in the papers that he is laid up with the gout.
AN OLD IRISH TUNE.
WE had fought, we had marched, we had thirsted all day,
And, footsore and heartsore, at nightfall we lay
By the banks of a streamlet whose thin little flood
A thousand of hoof-beats had churned into mud.
Our tongues were as parched as our spirits were damp,
And misery reigned all supreme in the camp,
When, sweet as the sigh of a zephyr in June,
There stole on our senses an old Irish tune.
It crept low and clear through the whispering pines,
It crossed the dull stream from the enemy’s lines,
And over the dreams of the slumberers cast
The magical spell of a voice from the past;
It lulled and caressed till the accents of pain
Sank to murmurs that seemed to entwine with its strain;
And soothed, as of old by a mother’s soft croon,
Was our worn-out brigade by that old Irish tune.
Now pensive, now lilting, half sob and half smile,
Like the life of our race or the skies of our isle,
Our eyelids it dimmed while it tempted our feet,
For our hearts seemed to chorus its cadences sweet.
Once again in old homes we were children at play,
Or we knelt in the little white chapel to pray.
Or burned with the passion of manhood’s hot noon,
And loved o’er again in that old Irish tune.
A Johnny who crouched by the river’s dark marge,
To pick off our stragglers, neglected his charge,
And out in the moonlight stood, tearful and still,
Most tempting of marks for a rifleman’s skill;
A dozen bright barrels could cover his head,
But never a ball on its death-mission sped;
Our fingers were nerveless to harm the gossoon
Who wept like ourselves at an old Irish tune!
It linked with its strains ere they melted away
True hearts severed only by blue coats and gray,
But faithful on both sides, in triumph and woe,
To the home and the hopes of the long, long ago.
The air seemed to throb with invisible tears
Ere burst from both camps a tornado of cheers,
And a treaty of peace, to be broken too soon,
Was wrought for one night by that old Irish tune.
“HARVEY DUFF.”
THERE is no country in Christendom whose inhabitants are so susceptible to music as the Irish. An itinerant musician, wandering round the different fairs in Ireland, can exercise an influence with his bagpipes or fiddle almost as superhuman as that of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. “God Save Ireland” will hush the listeners into reverential silence; “Savourneen Deelish” will cause tears to glisten on cheeks that a moment before were flushed with merriment; “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” will agitate the toes and rustle the petticoats of two thirds of the living humanity in earshot, and if that instrumentalist fancies himself a John L. Sullivan, and wishes for an opportunity of testing the muscles of the manhood about him, let him try the “Boyne Water” for five minutes. If he don’t get pretty well scattered about, it will be because he has been killed in the lump.
But of all the effects of all the tunes to which all the composers existing for all the centuries have devoted all their genius, there is none so startling, so instantaneous, so blood-curdling as that produced upon a constable by the strains of “Harvey Duff.” A red rag flourished in the eyes of a mad bull, a free-trade pamphlet in a Republican convention, a Chinese policeman ordering Denis Kearney to move on, or a trapped mouse wagging its tail defiantly at a cat helplessly growling outside the wirework, may provoke diabolical ebullitions of wrath; but if you want to see a forty-horse power, Kansas cyclone, Rocky Mountain tornado, Java earthquake, Vesuvius volcano, blue-fire and brimstone, dynamite and gun-cotton, and all the elements combined, crash of rage, hate, venom, spleen, disgust, and agony, just learn “Harvey Duff,” take a trip across to Ireland, insure your life, encase yourself in a suit of mail, and whistle it for the first policeman you meet. The result will amply repay the journey. You needn’t take a return ticket. If he be anything like an average peeler, you won’t want it. It might be as well to ascertain beforehand the number of ribs you possess. It will interest you in hospital to know how many are missing; that is, if you are lucky enough to go to hospital.