Now, this was getting a little warm; so I winked at a young fellow down along the table, and he took the hint promptly, and cried out: "Look here, Father Dan, this is tiresome. Tell us how you managed the Irish Brigade in France in the fifties. Weren't they going to throw Marseilles into the sea?"
"Now, now," said I, "that won't do. I'm not going to be trotting out that old chestnut at every dinner party. Let us have a song!"
And we had, and a good many of them,—dear, old Irish melodies that would melt an icicle and put blood into a marble statue. No nonsense at my table, I assure you. No operatic rubbish, but genuine Irish music, with the right lilt and the right sentiment. I did let a young fellow once sing, "I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls"; but I told him never to repeat it. But it was worth while going miles to hear my curate singing, in his own fine voice, that superb ballad of that true and gentle patriot, Thomas Davis, "The Mess-tent is Full, and the Glasses are Set."
Dear me! what a mercurial race we are; and how the mercury runs up and down in the barometer of our human hearts! I could see the young priests' faces whitening at the words:
"God prosper old Ireland! You'd think them afraid,
So pale grew the chiefs of the Irish Brigade!"
and softening out in lines of tenderness when the end came:
"For, on far foreign fields, from Dunkirk to Belgrade,
Lie the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish Brigade."
Then we had "The West's Awake," and "Dear Land," and then we all arose and sang together, "God bless the Pope, the great, the good." I was going to say "sang in unison," but I am afraid I should be trespassing on the sacred precincts of truth; yet if that grand old man in Rome, that electric spark in the vase of alabaster, sitting in that lonely chamber, behind the long, empty, gas-lit state apartments, could hear those voices there above the western seas, he would surely realize more keenly what he understands already, that he can always call upon his Irish reserves to ring, as with a fence of steel, the chair and the prerogatives of Peter.
Then came the "Good nights." I pulled aside an old friend, a great theologian, who has all kinds of musty, dusty, leather-bound, water-stained volumes on his shelves.
"Did you ever hear," I whispered, "of a mysterious thing, called the Kampaner Thal?"