About four months after Solomon's death, an American vessel was lying at the Pigeon House, waiting for the tide. Several of the passengers were assembled in Mrs. Thumbstall's tavern—previous to the departure of the brig—where, as was then usual, they amused themselves by drinking punch and dancing. Among them was a little thin fellow, dressed in a short frieze coat, striped waistcoat, corduroy breeches, and stout brogues; beside him sat a comely, youthful, but somewhat prim female, dressed as a plain peasant girl. The moment the floor became vacant, the little frieze-coated fellow got to his legs, accompanied by the female, and addressed the musician as follows:
“My good friend, there is—is much cheerfulness in thy music, for which reason this young person and I will trouble you to play us that sustaining psalm—I mean that blessed air called the Swaggering Jig, which is really a consoling planxtic—come, Susanna.”
Good by, Solomon, thou art now gone to that land of true liberty, and sorry are we to say, that thou has left so many who are so much worse than thyself behind thee! One of the most virtuous acts of thy life was the defrauding the Spiritual Railway Assurance office of two thousand pounds upon the fiction of thy death; which, truth to say, was a very bitter fiction to them.
Our chronicles are closed. Need we say that Richard Topertoe, on gaining the title and estate, became a resident landlord, and is at this day enjoying a green and happy old age upon one of the best managed properties in Ireland, where his tenantry are grateful, prosperous, and happy. Mary M'Loughlin, her husband, and family, lived happily, as they deserved to live, and some, of them live yet, and will easily recognize themselves in these pages.
Of Phil, we must say a word or two. On finding himself the uncontrolled inheritor of his father's ill-gotten wealth, he accelerated his progress in drunkenness and profligacy. He took to the turf, became a gambler and spendthrift, and went backwards in squandering his fortune through as unprincipled a course as his father pursued in making it. From step to step he came down until nothing was left. Having no manly principle to sustain him, he fell from one stage of rascality and meanness to another, until he succeeded at length in getting himself appointed as an under turnkey in Castle Cumber Gaol. A whisper has gone abroad, that upon a critical occasion when the Sheriff, owing to the death of a certain functionary essential to the discharge of his duty, felt himself considerably at a loss, he found in one of the under turnkeys a convenient substitute.
The living of Castle Cumber, left vacant by the promotion of Mr. Lucre to a Bishopric, was given to an Englishman, as was then the practice, and would be now, were it not for the influence of common shame and public opinion.
Mr. Clement opened an Academy in Castle Cumber, and succeeded; for he thought it a wiser thing to live by teaching a school, than to suffer his large family and himself to starve by the gospel.
We now beg to close, by a paragraph from the True Blue:—
“Elevation of the Rev. Dr. Lucre to the See of ———
“For many years a duty at once so painful and so delightful, has not devolved upon us as a public journalist. The elevation of the Right Rev., Father in God,, Phineas Lucre to the See of ———, is a dispensation to our Irish Establishment which argues the beneficent hand of a wise and overruling Providence. In him we may well say, that another bright and lustrous star is added to that dark, but beautiful galaxy, in the nether heavens above us, which is composed of our blessed Bishops. The diocese over which he has been called by the Holy Spirit to preside, will know, as they ought, how to appreciate his learning and attainments. But what shall we say of the poor of Castle Cumber, to whom he has been such a kind, meek, charitable, and consoling dispenser of God's gifts and God's word? At the bed of death, of disease, of poverty—at every post, no matter how poor, low, neglected, or how dangerous—there was he to be found, the champion of God—fighting his battles in peace, self-denial, and charity. It is true, he is not an Irishman; but is it not a blessed thing that such links of love as he, and of those who resemble him, should continue to bind the virtues of the two churches, and the two countries together? His Lordship was consecrated on last Sunday, by that Right Rev. and blessedly facetious prelate, Archbishop Drapely, who, in addition to his other evangelical gifts, is said to be a perfect Toler in canonicals. It is not often that so much piety proceeds from so comic a source.”