An Address To Slaves.[J]

Helots of Ireland! Bow down to the stranger; Bondsmen and serfs! bend the sycophant knee; Forget the brave hearts who have faced every danger, Death, dungeon, and exile that ye might be free! Be Emmet forgotten, Tone’s story unspoken; Let the green shamrocks wither above their lone graves, Or should the last sleep of such heroes be broken Let it be by the shouts that proclaim ye are slaves.

Aye, shout! Though oppression stalks over the old land; Though thousands are leaving your desolate isle. Aye, shout! Till your cheers tell the world ye have sold land, Faith, honor, and truth, for a Prince’s false smile. The iron has entered your souls, and forever May it brand you as craven and false to your race; May the years that roll by bring oblivion never To cloak your dishonor or shroud your disgrace.

Shout, shout, puny slaves, though each banner that dances Round the path of the Prince is the alien red, Crack your throats, though the gleam of yon glittering lances Is dimmed by the blood of your innocent dead. Kiss the ground at his feet, though the soldiers that guard him, Your fathers and kinsmen have ruthlessly slain, Be dogs to the last, and like mongrels reward him, By coating in slime every link of your chain.

But cowardly serfs, in your crouching remember The people and ye are no longer the same, And every heart where one flickering ember Of manhood’s ablaze has contempt for your shame. Then go, join the ranks of the knaves who have bartered God’s birthright of freedom for titles and gold. The heart of the nation beats still for the martyred, Though their glory and cause be unsung and untold.

When ye, abject hounds, and your cheers shall have perished, When the Prince and his courtiers shall sleep in the grave, Their name and their fame and their work shall be cherished While one Irish bosom is faithful and brave. In honorless tombs all their foes will be rotten, When the cause that they died for, triumphant and grand, Shines out, o’er the tombstones of princes forgotten, In the sunrise of Liberty bathing our land.

EXPLOITS OF AN IRISH REPORTER.

For enterprise, facility of invention and expedient, and the ability to “get there” in spite of every difficulty and obstacle, the American newspaper man is a century ahead of his European brother; but I know of one Irish knight of the stylograph who could give even a Yankee points, if we are to believe his friends.

Brian has been known to take notes in a rain-storm with a sharp-pointed scissors on the ribs of his umbrella.

When his leg was broken in a boiler explosion, he chronicled the event on the bandages.

When he had to disguise himself as a bandsman at an Orange demonstration, he took down the chairman’s speech in the mouth of his trombone.

He sent a graphic account of an Arctic expedition engraven on blocks of ice from Smith’s Sound, and he once pencilled the story of a railway collision on the wooden leg of a survivor. He forgot to mention how the mangled victim was accommodated with an artificial limb so soon after the disaster, but he never bothers his head about such minor details.

But his greatest phonographic achievement was in Central Africa a few years ago. King Mtesa, the dusky potentate discovered by Stanley, picked up from his European guests, among other accomplishments, the art of making speeches. It was a new, a delicious recreation to the savage soul. Twice a month he assembled his warriors, and held forth, and the ebon Secretary of State who failed to ejaculate the Central African substitute for “hear, hear,” at the proper moment, was served up for luncheon on the conclusion of the speech.

Brian heard of this. It became the one burning ambition of his soul to take a shorthand note of the Boston-baked-beans-color orator. He set out for Tanganyika to carry out his project. Accompanied by a dozen sons of night he penetrated the African jungle, swam its turgid rivers, evaded its hungry tribes, escaped its fierce animals, and after weeks of adventure and suffering, with his faithful followers, reached the king’s kraal the evening before one of that monarch’s speeches.

He had been scalped, had all his teeth drawn, lost a few toes, been once half boiled, and on another occasion baked nearly to a sweet and toothsome brown; still he had survived.

But, alas! he had lost his pencil and note-book, and these indispensable adjuncts of caligraphic civilization were unknown in Mtesa’s territory since Stanley had left.

Our reporter, however, had an inventive intellect not to be thwarted by such trifling obstacles. He hunted up a chalk ridge, and when the Cicero in jet addressed his subjects, Brian planted his Zanzibari attendants on their hands and knees, and took the speech in chalk upon their naked backs.

Mtesa, in return for the promise of a copy of the paper containing the speech, furnished the stenographer and his animated note-books with an escort to the coast, and triumph would have crowned Brian’s effort but for the most striking passages of the oration being lost through one of the blacks sitting down on a wet bank before he had been transcribed!

A POLITICAL LESSON SPOILED.

He was a Boston teacher, and of course had an intellect superior to the cut-and-dry theories of instruction that were followed by the common herd of schoolmasters. He believed in object-lessons; in illustrations that should catch the young idea on the fly, as it were. Thus, when he wanted to fix in the memories of the youthful scholars the titles of the principal reigning monarchs and rulers of Europe, he didn’t keep them for half an hour each day iterating monotonously, “the Queen of England,” “the President of France,” “the King of Italy,” “the Emperor of Germany,” “the Sultan of Turkey,” and “the Czar of Russia.” Not he. He elevated his pupils to a higher sense, a more individual appreciation, of the majesties of the Continent. He told Mike, the saloon keeper’s son, to know himself in future as the French President; Franz Schweibiere became Emperor of Germany; he bestowed royal honors on all his most promising pupils, and he felt proudly conscious that he had planted firmly in their minds, as part of their own identity, the knowledge of the sovereigns who are the arbiters of the Old World’s destiny. We draw a veil over his emotions when on a recent unhappy morning the King of Italy held up a greasy hand and piped out, “Please, sir, de Sultan of Turkey won’t be here to-day. De Emperor of Russia hit him a smash in de eye last night, and blinded him!”

THE LION’S LAMENTATION.

They are marching on Herat, half a million men, or more, Over the frontier they’re swarming; And they do not seem to mind at all my remonstrative roar, But grin as if its melody were charming; Turk and Italian, Teuton and Gaul, Friends of the past, where, where are ye all? Great Patience! are ye laughing at the poor old lion’s fall? Really, the prospect is alarming.

’Tis useless boasting now we can whip them one to ten, Woe is me! the fact is quite contrary; We might when “English” soldiers came from Irish hill and glen, But there’s no recruiting now in Tipperary. No, nor from Antrim downward to Clare, From seaboard of Galway across to Kildare, Can I find a single Irishman to help me anywhere, Except he be a Corydon or Carey.

Oh dear, oh kind, oh glorious, oh darling Uncle Sam, Am I not your father and your mother? Pray listen to the bleatings of the martyred British lamb, Help, brave soul, oh help, before I smother. Irving and Arnold your culture will bless, All the dudes of London your image will caress, Oscar go across again to teach you how to dress, And we’ll be the world to one another.

Bennett, Smalley, don’t you hear the marching going on? The tramp my Indian provinces is shaking, Greycoats from the Ural and Cossacks from the Don, Is it any wonder that I’m quaking? O Lord! the tortures, the terrors I feel! Even my roar has been changed to a squeal, And--my heart to palsy, my very blood congeal-- That d--d old Irish wolf-dog is awaking!