Larry began very timidly, but in a few moments an admiring group was collected around him. A purchaser was soon found for Phelim, and Teddy having doubled his money, felt rich and grand, and cast rather contemptuous looks on his thriftless cousin. But before the day was over, Larry had made more money than two pigs like Phelim would bring—by playing for the dancers, and singing ballads. Among those who listened most attentively to him was a great musician from Dublin, who saw at once that the lad had a remarkable genius for music. He talked with him, and was much pleased with his intelligence and modesty. Larry was glad to find it was the same gentleman whose writing-case he had picked up a few months before.
Mr. R—— inquired where the boys lived, and the next day drove down to Michael O'Shaughnessy's, and offered to take his nephew and educate him for a musician.
So Larry went to town, to live with his kind benefactor. He was well clothed and cared for and being good and grateful, studied hard to be a finished musician. He never forgot his humble home, or felt above his poor relations. Every Sunday he walked out to see them, and good old Dermot, who was fond and proud of him, you may depend. His cousin Katy grew still dearer to him as the years wore on, and he blessed the time when he was rich enough to take her to Dublin, and put her to school. It was said she was to be governess—but every body thought Larry would have no other wife but Katy—and every body was right.
Larry has become a great musician—so great that even Mrs. O'Shaughnessy admits that he "is not a bad fiddler."
From Dublin to Cork and Blarney Castle.
LITTLE NORAH AND THE BLARNEY STONE.
We left Dublin for Cork, on a fresh August morning—pleasant but showery, like nearly all mornings in Ireland. The railway on which we travelled, passes for the most part through a barren, boggy, desolate country, with only here and there a tract of well cultivated land—past low, miserable hovels of bog-working peasants, and wretched, tumble-down little villages.
It was melancholy to see, all along our way, multitudes of ruins—churches and castles and towers—battered, dismantled, and ivy-grown—making it look more like a country of the dead than of the living. In these crumbling remains, you read, almost as in a book, the history of the ancient prosperity and power of Ireland, and of its gradual destruction by wars, sieges, famine, and pestilence, till it was brought to its present state of poverty and desolation.