'I'd sooner break my heart, Cuthbert,' she says earnestly, and there is no faltering in her sweet voice or in her steadfast gaze. 'You little know how happy I am since I have come to the decision you desired. My path seems straight before me now, and indeed it looks more inviting than any I have ever trodden before.'

This was certainly true; for Olga's ways of life had been rough, stony, and irksome hitherto. The sunshine of love and happiness had not illumined her faltering footsteps; but she had struggled on bravely in spite of hardships and difficulties of all kinds, and now the goal of blissful content seemed suddenly within her reach.

'I am too happy; your love is too good, my dearest,' she murmured, as she bade her betrothed good-night; and then she piously added, God is most merciful to me; I must strive earnestly to deserve the blessings He has showered upon me.'

Olga had known but little happiness in her hard commonplace life; and the night she had pledged her word to Cuthbert Strange she could not sleep for visions of future delight. She thought of the home that would surely be hers some day now, the home where Cuthbert would be master, and she his happy devoted wife. They would not be rich, she knew; but however humble their surroundings, they must be content, for they would be together. His dear presence would make the home bright; his love would hallow it. His precious love, which had aroused some of the best and purest feelings of womanhood in her maidenly bosom, feelings that not even the blighting atmosphere in which she had lived of late had been able to stifle entirely.

sufficiently to demand his supper, it was long past midnight; but Olga had not heeded the slow passage of the weary hours; she had sat by the fire, watching the bright radiance there which Cuthbert's fuel had illumined afresh, and she had built glowing castles of future happiness, in which he, her hero, her lover, and her would-be husband played an all-important part.

Mr. Layton awoke in a peaceable and subdued frame of mind. He ate the supper provided for him without grumbling, and he did not demand more brandy than his daughter had put into his tumbler to begin with. All this was fortunate, and Olga wished that Cuthbert could have stayed to see how good father was this evening!

Cuthbert, meanwhile, was neither in bed nor dreaming; he was pacing restlessly to and fro in the little back bedroom he had hired, because he wished to be under one roof with Olga, and he was thinking, thinking, thinking.

But in the midst of all his troubled reflections there shone one steadfast, comforting, hopeful ray. Olga had promised to be his wife. She was adorable, and, of all women he had ever known, the only one in whose fair hands he felt sure his future happiness was safe. She trusted him implicitly, bless her! And he would deserve the faith she so readily gave him. He would cherish, protect, and shelter her. The storms of life should pass her by unheeded, unknown. She had had terrible troubles and trials in her sad past; but the future was his, and he would make it both glad and bright for her.

To give himself a better chance of doing so, Cuthbert Cyril Strange married Olga Layton at the office of the registrar in Westminster within a week of his proposal to

'LOYALTY,' says Swift, 'is the foible of the Irish.' This is perhaps because the Irishman is the most conservative of men. The tenacity with which he clings to old habits and old prejudices is one of the curiosities of civilisation. In many respects he has not altered since the days of Cairbre the Cat-headed. The grave historian Ware preserves the name and action of a judge who wrote in the reign of King Constantine Centimachus (Con of the Hundred Battles), A.D. 177, a tract warning the lieges' against the arts of designing men who lay traps for the ignorant and unwary.' His lordship might have had in his judicial eye such rogues as promoters of the bubble company or professors of the confidence trick; but it is more likely his counterblast was of the kind now launched by learned successors from the bench of the Landed Estates, the Assize, or the County Court, against the 'political adventurers,' the 'firebrands' and 'demagogues' who entrap their 'dupes' from the platform of the Land League. In that case Mr. Parnell's vocation boasts a respectable antiquity. At all events the agitator was in full peroration in Spenser's time, for the 'Divine Edmund' writes of the monster meetings the Irishrie were addicted to holding upon a rath or hill, there to parlie, as they say, of matters and wrongs.'

We talk of the Ireland of Miss Edgeworth and William Carleton as if it had passed away. Not at all. It has but changed somewhat, just as Captain Rock has put on a

VOL. XXVII.

fresh disguise, and now signs himself Rory of the Hill. If we look higher than the populace, we find the past still lingering in vestiges of the fine old ways and manners. Castle Rackrent still exists west of the Shannon, where every foot of property is supposed to be mortgaged for more than its value. There is this difference, however, that the freehanded Sir Kit is gone for good and all, and that Sir Murtagh, instead of squeezing his tenants on the spot, and within 'measurable distance' of a convenient ambuscade behind a hedge, puts on the screw by proxy, and is himself a permanent absentee, seldom turning up on his native soil, and then only with the shirt of mail under his waistcoat and an armed constable at each side of him.

One form of the aborigine appears to have vanished almost as completely as the dodo or the mastodon. This is the Irishman of Lever. What has become of that witty, airy, gay, deuce-maycare person? Some declare him an extinct species. The visitor is not more puzzled to account for him than the native, who is, with very rare exceptions, a brooding melancholy man, given to despondent views of things, and nursing grievance like one who finds a luxury in woe. This temperament has made Lord Beaconsfield the author of at least one epigram having both truth and point in it. One does not venture to suggest that possibly the extension of popular education has destroyed the

PP

animal spirits of the race, and afflicted them with the care begot of knowledge.

Among the national usages which have resisted all change, and survived even transportation beyond the seas, are the wake and the faction fight. The Irishman shifts his lares to New York or London, but until either centre absorbs him, name and nature, which it is sure to do in three generations, he puts his household gods between him and the ways and idols of the foreigner. But the children of Erin do not bemoan their exile as did the children of Israel. They do not sit and weep by the waters of Babylon; they make themselves merrily at home on the strange shore. Their party and political demonstrations are as warlike, as clamorous, as excited in Liverpool or Philadelphia as in Dublin or Cork. They wake their dead with as much exuberance of festive celebration in the Bowery or in Drury-lane as ever was known in the country where Oliver Goldsmith, travelling in his early vagabond days to visit a relative in Munster, dragged himself, footsore and famishing, to a house of mourning near Blarney, and was relieved by a kind rustic with the charity of a handful of peas, the flavour of which remained pleasantly upon the palate of his memory for ever after.

As to the faction-fight, gone, it is true, in a great degree, are the glories of Brian the Brave; but the days of the hero are not o'er. However the process of the suns may be slowly moulding the Irishman into monotonous uniformity with a dull world, there is one trait in which his nature seems unalterable by any circumstances. That is his combativeness. He is just as ready to conspire, to quarrel, or to fight as ever he was. Whether he be waiting for General Hoche or

General O'Donovan Rossa, whether he be a Home Ruler confronting an Orangeman at Belfast, a Doranite assailing a Parnellite at Queenstown, or only a Shanavest platonically pommelling a Corovat in Limerick, he is either anticipating a row or in the actual enjoyment of it. The faction-fight in Ireland has fallen into a disrepute like that which has overtaken the prize-ring in England. But though out of vogue generally, the pastime is vigorously practised in certain localities. The great fighting factions are the antagonists already named - the Corovats and the Shanavests, and the 'Three Year Olds' and the 'Four Year Olds,' hostile clans as fierce and famous in Limerick or Tipperary as the Castellani and the Nicoloti were once in Venice, or the Montagues and Capulets in Verona. Authorities can be cited here. The Cork Examiner, in a recent issue, prints a war correspondence describing a pitched battle at the last Limerick races between a party from the city which Captain Toby Shandy helped to besiege, and an enemy from the county represented in the alien Parliament by that 'bug who frights us all' (on the Treasury Bench), the redoubtable Mr. Dillon. According to the chronicle, the invaders from the 'Thermopyla of Ireland,' being armed with heavy bludgeons, wrought dreadful execution upon the champions from the Shannon shore. But the encounter was a trifle to what it might have been; for we read in the same record that the gathering on the racecourse was largely attracted by the expectation of a conflict on a grand scale. Through a mistake, it ap pears neither faction brought its full strength. Again, the Dublin journals inform us that it is the habit and usage of two factions in the neighbourhood of the Irish. metropolis to meet every Sunday

on pretence of playing the harmless hurley or kicking the fantastic football, but really to taste the pleasures of a mutual mauling. The presence of strong bodies of constabulary does not always spoil sport; for it was only the other day that a considerate Justice of the Peace warned the police at Petty Sessions to stick by the rigid letter of the law, and have due care how they interfered with the innocent recreations of the people.

A native writer who has discussed this subject is cautious in setting forth the difference between a party-fight and a faction-fight. The party-fight is an institution of the Northern Province. It is an effect of racial and religious hate, and is marked by all the fury and vindictiveness of the theological odium. The faction-fight is a Southern custom, and is as devoid of malice as of meaning. It is a mere holiday amusement, a traditional observance having its origin in no why or wherefore, resulting as naturally from the contact of the clans as the spark results from the meeting of flint and steel.

The tendency to condemn whatever is peculiarly Irish ranks among the national grievances. That tendency is, beyond doubt, too powerful for theorists like Professor Rhys, of Cambridge, who would have it that the Anglo-Saxon, as he calls himself, is more probably (and if he only knew his own forefathers) a Celt. No average Englishman will admit that the bull may be a British façon de parler as well as an Irish figure of speech. This grammatical attitude is absurd, for the catechresis is as old as Greek civilisation; so is the faction-fight, which was invented, it would appear, either by Pelops, the son of Tantalus, King of Phrygia, or by the Emperor Nero. It was one or other of those illustrious personages who originated the pageant

perpetuated in the mock fight at the bridge of Pisa. This parody of war was, or is, a sham battle fought by about a thousand combatants armed with wooden clubs. The struggle was limited to threequarters of an hour. If the scales of victory did not turn in that time, the play was declared equal; but it was very seldom that some one side failed to possess itself of the field. Stratagem was allowed, but real fight was forbidden. This sport, like the Irish Kriegspiel, frequently cost lives; it was therefore seldom permitted, and has been suppressed. It is described by a traveller, who writes of it in an appreciative Irish spirit, as 'one of the most attractive spectacles in Italy.' We have further proof of the antiquity of the factionfight. The Lacedemonians encouraged their youth to such conflicts by way of a martial and robust education. If the Eurotas has not flowed into the Thames, it is not the fault of our London youth, who are very ready to descend into the streets, and there, banded into hostile parties, do battle for the glory of their respective parishes. The Genius of the Age in a constable's uniform hauls these modern Spartans before a magistrate, and a fine or a whipping ends the war between St. Giles and St. Pancras, to the notable relief of the ratepayers.

The Brothers Banim and Carleton write, in a sympathetic vein, of the faction-fight. Thackeray, in the Lyra Hibernia, just touches the fringe of the subject, to which, it may be observed, Christopher North alludes in a passage which suggests his admiration for the 'divarshun.' But the Muse which has most particularly laid herself out for the theme is that of an inglorious Milton, who claims to sing as an actor in the scene he consecrates. He frankly admits that he sickened

of the fray, and withdrew from it in a fashion more creditable to his discretion than his valour. But he insists that he ran away in good company; for did not Demosthenes fly from Cheronea, Horace from Philippi, Lucilius from the siege of Numantia while neither Chénier the Frenchman nor Körner the German made a very brilliant business of it in his maiden fight.

The author of this curious epic sets out with an invocation in the orthodox style. He calls on Clio

to

'Bless the suppliant who boldly draws The patriot goose-quill in his country's cause ;'

in order that, as Homer and 'other bards sang men of other days,' he may strike a lyre of simpler sound,

'And vaunt in metre worthy of his deeds How smites O'Toole or how MacKenna bleeds.'

Apparently satisfied that his prayer has been heard and his ambition gratified, he draws a comparison between the Irishman as a fighting animal and the foreigner, in which the sordid and ignoble nature of the stranger and his squabbles is asserted:

The fiery Frank, the bearded Muscovite,
For honour, profit, or for glory fight;
And English phlegm and Scottish tact are
bold

To strike for business or to bleed for gold. These bare no sword without some end in view,

Freedom to gain or freedom to undo,
A wrong to right, a tyranny to break-
But who among them fights for fighting'
sake?'

Leaving this pertinent question to the reader, the poet introduces us to the scene of conflict:

'Shine out on Ballyhack, soft April sun: Now it is noon and half thy course is run. Shine out on Ballyhack's bi-yearly fair, And on the crowds that to that fair repair;

The air-inquisitive and anxious eye
Mark those alike that sell and those who
buy.

The needy peasant's ostentatious pig
Its owner praises, eloquently big,
Commends its habits, and its breed com-
mends,

Sticks at the price, and tardily descends; The tempting coins his itching palm

caress,

The figure falling as the pennies press,
While, lest his poverty be made his thrall,
He shouts indifference to sell at all.
Here stands the farmer's solitary cow,
Whose wants oppress and force to part
her now;

But small the benefit that shall accrue -
His hopeless lot his wants shall still pur-

sue.

The fair is gay throughout its long extent With festive booth and temulentive tent; Here, wondrous sight! the men of either clan

Drink friendly toasts and pledge each hostile man:

In simple merriment they wile the time With dance and jest and unadorned rhyme.

In corners opportune the maidens coy List the soft love-tale of the favoured "boy,"

While amorous sounds, suggestive of the

kiss,

At frequent intervals bespeak their bliss. The sires approving and the dames sit by,

Survey the couple with indulgent eye, And in their converse see the marriage nigh.

The blatant bagpipe and the violin sweet
Measure the time to educated feet;
The song, the joke, the ringing laugh go
round-

Here is no strife, but mirth and peace abound.

Thrice-happy land, where graces such are found!'

This might be a rather rough sketch of Sweet Auburn making holiday. But the villagers make merry over a volcano. The clans have gathered with a set purpose, and it needs but a word or a motion from a scion or a follower of the rival houses of Mac or O' to let the storm loose in all its fury. Such members of the local population as have no personal interest in the impending fray, and feel no enthusiastic desire to join in and help the fun, keep a sharp eye on the auguries, and take care to put themselves and their belongings in good time out of harm's way. But here the Iliad may be very fairly quoted:

'What omens dread and signs of dire attack

Affright the villagers of Ballyhack, Announce, O Bard, to whom the dreaded signs