ands. Melancholy human love
wandered out on distant heaths, or beneath dank and gloomy cypresses,
murmuring its unanswered sorrow, or hateful gnomes sported and sang in
the stagnant swamps triumphing in unearthly tones over the knight whom
they had lured to his death. Such was Blokeeta's night's entertainment;
and when he at length closed the piano, and hurried away through the
cold morning, he left a memory about the instrument from which I could
never escape.

Those snow-shoes that hang in the space between the mirror and the door
recall Canadian wanderings,--a long race through the dense forests, over
the frozen snow through whose brittle crust the slender hoofs of the
caribou that we were pursuing sank at every step, until the poor
creature despairingly turned at bay in a small juniper coppice, and we
heartlessly shot him down. And I remember how Gabriel, the _habitant_,
and Francois, the half-breed, cut his throat, and how the hot blood
rushed out in a torrent over the snowy soil; and I recall the snow
_cabane_ that Gabriel built, where we all three slept so warmly; and the
great fire that glowed at our feet, painting all kinds of demoniac
shapes on the black screen of forest that lay without; and the
deer-steaks that we roasted for our breakfast; and the savage
drunkenness of Gabriel in the morning, he having been privately drinking
out of my brandy-flask all the night long.

That long haftless dagger that dangles over the mantelpiece makes my
heart swell. I found it, when a boy, in a hoary old castle in which one
of my maternal ancestors once lived. That same ancestor--who, by the
way, yet lives in history--was a strange old sea-king, who dwelt on the
extremest point of the southwestern coast of Ireland. He owned the whole
of that fertile island called Inniskeiran, which directly faces Cape
Clear, where between them the Atlantic rolls furiously, forming what the
fishermen of the place call "the Sound." An awful place in winter is
that same Sound. On certain days no boat can live there for a moment,
and Cape Clear is frequently cut off for days from any communication
with the mainland.

This old sea-king--Sir Florence O'Driscoll by name--passed a stormy
life. From the summit of his castle he watched the ocean, and when any
richly laden vessels bound from the South to the industrious Galway
merchants, hove in sight, Sir Florence hoisted the sails of his galley,
and it went hard with him if he did not tow into ha