les 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?_"

"Never," he said, emphatically.

"You couldn't conjecture what it is?"

"No," he said, with deliberation; "but I can aver it is neither Greek,
Latin, nor Irish."

"Would you mind looking up your cyclopaedias," I pleaded, "and letting me
know immediately that you find it?"

"Of course," he replied. Then, jerking his thumb over his shoulder: "I
suppose it i