Our steel shone ’mid your bayonets,
Our grief now sobs with your regrets,
Our shamrocks fringe your violets.
MAINE AND MAYO.
SIX months in front of Richmond’s walls we fretted and we fumed,
As vainly as our peevish growls our surly cannon boomed;
We traced no path of glory through the slimy, oozy swamp,
But misery and discontent were monarchs of our camp.
There was snarling and complaining all along the Union line,
And our brigade was loudest in the universal whine,
While the surliest, the churliest, the sourest in our train
Was a cross and crusty, rude and rusty, lanky crank from Maine.
Death lurked in half a dozen shapes among the vapors foul,
The grumbling choir each morning lacked some long-familiar howl;
And to fill the vacant places new arrivals were impressed,
Whose tempers in a week or so grew viler than the rest.
One day with such a batch there came a boy with sunny hair,
And a laugh that took the breath away of every veteran there,
Who said to us, in accents like a streamlet’s rippling flow,
“I’m very glad to meet ye—I’m a stranger from Mayo.”
Lord! how that youngster danced and sang and laughed his cheerful way
To hearts sealed up by selfishness for many a gloomy day;
He gave Time golden pinions with a thousand merry wiles,
And routed regiments of blues with fusilades of smiles.
Our crank of cranks fought sullenly, with dismal brow, at first,
Frowned like a Northern thunder-cloud, the while he inly cursed;
But his wintry soul grew warmer in the genial Irish glow,
Till the frost from Maine was melted by the sunshine from Mayo.
And when on quiet evenings from out our camp arose
Strange sounds of mirth and merriment that puzzled lurking foes,
When “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” shook the leafless Southern pines,
Or “The Rocky Road to Dublin” seemed a-winding through our lines,
A pair of feet went treading through the dance’s tangled maze
With a firm, determined step acquired in lumber-hauling days—
“Who Fears to Speak of Ninety-eight?” was sometimes the refrain,
And one sonorous voice objected to such cowardice in Maine.
. . . . . . .
Our corps is but a corporal’s guard; beneath Virginian clay,
Its heroes wait the bugle-blast of God’s reviewing day,
But the “twins,” as once we called them, Celt and Yankee, still remain,
Though one’s at home in Connaught, and the other back in Maine.
Outside the Mayo cabin green and starry flags proclaim
That Ireland’s in the Union now in everything but name;
While in Aroostook County a grim veteran wants to know
How soon will freedom need recruits to battle for Mayo.
A SANDY ROW SKIRMISH.
SANDY ROW, as everybody knows, is the Mecca and Medina of Orangeism in Belfast, the sacred shrine of its votaries, the land of promise of its true-blue tramps, the camp of its generals, the temple of its apostles, the sanctuary and haven of its political refugees, when fleeing from prospective fines of forty shillings and costs for holy war-cries of “To h—with the Pope.” If a Papist foot should dare pollute its consecrated—whiskey consecrated—shore, that Papist foot would be carrying a head that was in danger of having what little brains it contained undergo a process of amalgamation with the oleaginous slush of the desecrated pavement.