Here, before a glowing fire, a fresh-caught salmon, cut into steaks, was broiling on arbutus skivers; and the founder of the feast, an Irish gentleman, whom we brought from the shore in our boat, hospitably invited us to postpone our luncheon until his guests arrived. Hungry, and anxious to proceed, we declined his courteous offer; but we should not have done so, had we been aware that he was awaiting the delightful party from Tralee. Alas, just as we had commenced our repast, and the boat so preciously freighted was descried in the distance, our pluvial fears were realised,
“And, in the scowl of heaven, each face
Grew dark as we were speaking.”
It was piteous to see those girls come ashore, with the gentlemen's overcoats enveloping their fairy forms, and protecting their best bonnets; and I never experienced so strong a desire in my life to be transformed into a gig-umbrella.
Suddenly the weather brightened, but not so the prospects of the pretty pic-nic. There was a brief colloquy between master and men, sounds of surprise and disappointment, not loud but deep, and then a general laughter, but dismally artificial; for the knives, and the plates, and the wine, and the bread, everything, in fact, except the salmon, just ready in its hot perfection, had been sent to the wrong Island!
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Thither, to our grim despair, went forth the Belles from Tralee; and, by the bones of St. Lumbago of Sciatica, I could have plunged into the flood, and followed in their lee, had I not been cognisant of a certain “alacrity in sinking,” which prevents the simultaneous removal of both my legs from the bottom. What would I not have given, to have changed places with the coxswain! I should have felt proud and happy as he who steered the immortal Seven at Henley, or as Edgar the Peaceable, when, keeping his court at Chester, and having a mind to go by water to the monastery of St. John Baptist, he was rowed down the Dee in a barge by eight Kings, himself sitting at the helm. 1
We mourned awhile, but the spirit of youth endures not to sorrow long. It bends low, but it will not break. It rises again in all its freshness after a glass of bitter beer, or just a mouthful of whiskey; and we soon looked our affliction in the face like men, and played the nightingale upon our empty bottles. I have studied somewhat sedulously to imitate, with a moistened cork upon glass, “de nightingirl, de lark, de trush” (as the ever-to-be-retained Von Joel hath it), and the performance was so successful, that two finches perched, attentively, within a yard of our heads, while the boatmen listened as admiringly as the Australian Diggers to the English lark; 2 and a newly-mar-ried couple, deliciously embowered above us, conversed as they sat on the green, and said, that “they had never quite believed the assertion that Ireland had no nightingales.” But Frank, unhappily, dispelled all these allusions, by trying his unpractised hand, and by educing such irregular and feeble chirpings, as would have disgraced a superannuated sparrow, or a tom-tit, hopelessly wrestling with an aggravated form of diphtheria.