'On the principle,' said I, 'of qui dort, dine.'
But that remark was lost upon Andy.
A PAUPER'S BURIAL
'Oul' Shan the Pote,' as the townsfolk called him, was a descendant in the direct male line of Shan O'Neill, the great rebel of Queen Elizabeth's day. He had a fine pedigree, but little else; for of all the possessions of his forefathers, all that remained to him was an old battered, silver punch-ladle and a silver-mounted dirk with a cairngorm in the hilt of it, which the envious-minded amongst his neighbors declared to be a bit of yellow glass. At such insinuations Shan used to wax mightily indignant, showing that he still retained his pride of birth; but on ordinary occasions that feeling was entirely subordinate in him to two others—his belief in his own genius as a poet, and his overflowing love for 'me daughter Kathleen, what's in Australey, the crathur.'
His actual position in the social scale did not quite coincide with his high ancestry and literary pretensions. He was a stone-cutter by trade, and had been for some years at one time in his life in my grandfather's service as odd man. With the partisanship of the Irish peasant, he thought that the latter circumstance made the family in general, and me in particular, his peculiar property, and used to treat us accordingly. When he was a young man, and the sap was still effervescent in him, he had been in the habit of going an occasional 'tear;' and once my grandmother, seeing the recumbent form of a man very drunk sleeping peacefully in the middle of the road in front of the house, and having a vision of carts jolting over him, called in the police to remove him to the lock-up. In the morning it turned out, much to her dismay, that the man she had thus given into custody was Shan, whom she was called upon to go and bail out again. That was the standing joke of his life. Whenever he saw her in his latter days he used to say, 'Ah, now, misthress dear, don't be ang-ery an' go an' give poor oul' Shan up to the polis, bad scran to thim,' and then he cackled vehemently at his own wit.
The last time I saw him was when I was a schoolboy of fifteen home for the holidays. He was then a little thin old man with deep wrinkles in his face, and long wispy gray hair that used to blow round his face in a dishevelled halo. I can see him now ambling along the street of the little town with his eyes fixed straight in front of him, with the inward gaze of the poet and the dreamer; 'moonin' down the road like a jackass wid a carrot in front of his nose,' his persecutors, the street boys, used to call it.
When he was more than usually elated by the recent appearance of some piece of doggerel of his in the poet's corner of the local rag, he would be heard crooning over to himself with a curious kind of sing-song lilt the words of his great poem, that had made his local reputation,—
'Oh, the banks an' braes o' wild Kilcross,
Where the blue-bells blow
An' the heath an' fern an' soft green moss
In the springtime grow,
Where the lads an' lasses take their play
Of a Sunday morn,
An' the blackbirds sing the livelong day
In the rustlin' corn.'
When I used to point out to him that 'the rustlin' corn' was a pure myth of his imagination, as the cliffs of 'wild Kilcross' were as bleak a place as you would find in 'a month of Sundays,' and that not a blade grew anywhere within a mile of them, he used to reply, 'Ah! whisht now, can't ye? If them wans haven't got the sinse to plant a lock ov oats, is it me as ye'd blame for it? Ahl that the likes av thim has a mind for is shpuds.'