THE FELONS OF OUR LAND.
FILL up once more, we’ll drink a toast
To comrades far away;
No nation on the earth can boast
Of braver hearts than they.
And though they sleep in dungeons deep,
Or flee, outlawed and banned,
We love them yet, we ne’er forget
The felons of our land!
In boyhood’s bloom and manhood’s pride,
Foredoomed by alien laws,
Some on the scaffold proudly died
For holy Ireland’s cause.
And brothers, say, shall we to-day
Unmoved like cowards stand,
While traitors shame and foes defame
The felons of our land?
Some in the convict’s dreary cell
Have found a living tomb,
And some unseen, unfriended, fell
Within its silent gloom.
Yet what care we, although it be
Trod by a ruffian band,
God bless the clay where rest to-day
The felons of our land!
Let cowards sneer and tyrants frown,
Oh, little do we care,
A felon’s cap’s the noblest crown
An Irish head can wear!
And every Gael in Innisfail
Who scorns the serf’s vile brand,
From Lee to Boyne would gladly join
The felons of our land!
AN OFFICIAL VALUATION.
THE wearied Sub-Commissioner was waiting for his car,
In the hospitable shelter of a Connemara bar;
And as he contemplated the interminable rain,
On the farm he had to visit he reflected with much pain,
For the roads were very dirty, and the distance very far.
The atmosphere was chilly, and the footway was a swamp,
And the spirits of the barrister (just like the morning) damp,
As he thought of bronchial attacks,
Pneumatic pains, rheumatic racks,
And the other consequences of his valuating tramp.
The lawyers had departed from the village with their spoil,
The landlord, and the agent, and the tenant shirked the toil
Of plodding ’mid the mist and fog,
O’er slimy clay and treacherous bog,
And had left him single-handed to investigate the soil.
His tumbler he replenished and he took another sip,
And as the grateful Jameson was moistening his lip,
His gloomy face relaxed,—indeed, he actually laughed;
He had drawn an inspiration in addition to the draught
That pointed an escape from his anticipated trip.