His fancy changed: he dreamt he stood beneath the rustling trees,
Which seemed to shake with laughter at the antics of the breeze.
A thousand flowers were ’neath his feet, rich, beautiful and rare,
As he was whispering love-tales to a maiden twice as fair.
He saw her startled attitude, he marked the rising blush,
He saw the tears of pleasure from her lovely eyelids gush,
He saw the joy and happiness she sought not to repress;
And with a thrill he heard again the softly whispered “Yes.”
His dream was changed: again he stood—and she was by his side,
Within the little village church to claim her as his bride;
Joy thrills his heart with happiness, his eyes with pleasure gleam,
When, hark! that noise! he wakes again to find it but a dream!
The wild wind moans in sorrow, and the rain begins to fall;
Where are the pictures of his dream? They’ve vanished one and all.
The lightnings flash, the thunders roll and rattle overhead,
And the very sky seems weeping o’er the joy forever fled!
He tries to rise, but, weak and faint, he cannot stir a limb;
Before his dazzled, weakened eyes the trees begin to swim.
He hears another rattle, and another rattle still,
And now through every nerve there runs a strange and fearful thrill!
A sudden pang has twitched his heart, has robbed him of his breath;
He gasps a moment, then he falls asleep,—but now in death!
The lightning struck him lying there, and severed life’s last link,
And the stars alone are weeping for the victim of the drink.
FREDERICK’S FOLLY.
IN a popular Dublin suburb, not quite a day’s forced march from Rathmines,—which, as every tourist in Ireland knows, is the Back Bay of the Hibernian metropolis,—there boarded, lodged, and sent out his washing last Christmas an æsthetic and highly “cul-chawed” young gentleman who had come all the way from London to take up a position in that branch of the civil service which hangs its banners from the outer walls of the Custom House, and receives for idling four hours a day whatever filthy Irish lucre may be presented in the shape of income. To spare the harrowed feelings of his afflicted relatives, I shall expose to a heartless world only his baptismal appellation, Frederick. In the clammy tomb of the miserable past I shall bury the remainder of his official signature.
Fred came, he saw, but he didn’t conquer, for alas! while he saw he was also seen, and his personal charms were not of a nature to strike his landlady’s daughter, a neat little, sweet little, captivating, sparkling Irish maiden, with the amorous feelings that his ardent soul desired. But on this Christmas eve of 1882, fortune had smiled upon Fred with a quarter’s salary, and he determined to add such embellishments to his face and form as should entrance and fill with rapture even a less susceptible heart than beat within the tender bosom of Norah Flaherty. He would pave the way by a Christmas present. He had a work-box. He would fill it with all the little knick-knacks dear to feminine weakness. But it was rather shabby. He would varnish it. Hamilton & Long, of Grafton Street, sold a celebrated composition warranted to change the plainest deal kitchen table into a highly ornamental walnut article-de-luxe, fit to adorn the library of a duke or the boudoir of a countess.
He left home to secure that miraculous compound. He secured it. Having time on hand, he resolved to devote it to the adornment of his person. He dropped into a barber’s temple in Wicklow Street. Now, in the British Isles, you cannot visit a barber for a five-cent shave without being subjected by him to eloquent seductions to purchase three or four dollars’ worth of hair-dyes, washes, cosmetics, and face powders. Frederick’s barber was like the rest of his insular tribe. He had barely got his devastating scissors ready for action on our hero’s cranium before he ventured to suggest that Fred’s hair was not—well, not quite a fashionable color. As the locks in question were of the decidedly martial color usually associated with the uniform of the English line or the—hem—nether garments of the French infantry, Frederick assented.