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!