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HILLOA, OUR FANCY.

FLIGHT THE FIRST.

A tearing north-wester has blown throughout the bleak length of the November night. The sea fetched up from Dundrum and Carlingford is running half-mast high upon the Kish, and breaking in thunder within a cable's length of the tossed and battered light-ship. A storm that has stripped the woods of Powerscourt, and tossed the waterfall in small spray from the face of the cliff, howls savagely in the Dargle. Another whirlwind rages through the loose rocks of the Scalp; the Glen of the Downs is all one tumbling tide of sere leaves, and the leaded lattices of Delgany rattle mournfully to the music which Zephyro-Boreas pipes like Pan in all the chimney-tops of Bellevue. From Rathdrum to the sea, Avonmore and Avoca roll, a brown deluge, between sighing banks of forests tortured in all their branches. Cronebawn replies to Avondale, the beech groves of Castle Macadam resound to the moaning steep of Ballyarthur, and Shelton's oaks are swinging in dismal concert from the Meeting of the Waters to the bridge of Arklow. But we, behind the sheltering bulk of black Killiney, sit here secure, serene, secluded, and half unconscious of ourselves in the lap impalpable of meditative ease. Strange perversity of our nature, that now, when all the rest of the world are gathering from bathing-box and lodge to their town houses, if they have them, or if not, to whatever shelter out of sight of the sea may be vouchsafed to them by fortune; we, on the contrary, have for a week been listening here to the surf of Killiney bay, and outwatching the Bear by night to hear the sleety storm far up in the sky, that whirled from the dripping obelisk, comes hustling over our low nest in hissing and howling eddies, breathing sleepless and shivering toil to the poor mariner. For well we love that solemn winter walk

"Between the sounding forest and the shore,"

when the leaves are gone, and the elements doing their worst by land and sea.

VOL. III.

:

That smack in the offing just now, is one of Langtry's London traders. Close-hauled as she is, she is getting enough of it under a try-sail and storm-jib. She will lie her course right on end to the North light, but will meet a thundering head-wind and a cross sea as sharp as a saw off Donaghadee. See how the spray washes her quarter-slap-up, over and over her. There was something heavier ah! it has tumbled aboard clean through the weather-bulwarks, and, doubtless, smack out as it came in. You may see the three standing stauncheons black between you and the sky under the foot of the try-sail, as she gets the list of every sea; but we wish we had our proofs corrected for insuring her at a couple of thousands. There is no safer sea-boat than a cutter of two hundred tons; but it is killing work on spars to stand the tug of a rood of canvass. Boom and bow-sprit bend to it in fresh weather like supple jacks: then half as many more hands are needed as on board a brig or schooner; but, in weather like this, they might scud where a staunch cutter of the same tonnage will lie whatever course within six points on each side of the wind her helmsman may desire.

That driving puff of smoke foretells a steamer, and there she shows her black bows past Dalkey, neither pig nor heifer on her holy-stoned deck, for she is his Majesty's packet from Kingstown, but clean seamen, and one or two well-muffled passengers; and there, on the weather paddle-box head, his speaking-trumpet in his hand, her commander, a lieutenant in the royal navy. Her paddles no longer raise a swell, as on the sheltered bosom of the Liffey: they now break down and trample through the bruised billows of the sea. Every object has, they say, its beauty, did we know where to look for it. The steamer's beauty lies neither in her stunted rigging nor in her clumsy chimney. Even that Whitehaven collier beating off Howth, under a close reefed foresail, minus her main

D

topmast, and plumping through it like
a Dutch lighter, exhibits a greater de-
of
gree
and action;
grace
for all her
parts, poor as they individually are,
seem to contribute their concurring ex-
ertions towards her whole motion;
but in the steamer we see nothing at
work save the long, black, bald, quiet
looking hull itself, pushed through the
broken waves as if by a hand beneath,
or by an unintermitting series of kicks
from an invisible foot astern. Yet the
steamer has her points as well as the
crack yacht of Cove, and a more beau-
tiful model of its kind need not be
desired than that of the upright and
stately vessel before us. Sharp as a
knife, broad beamed, clean in the run,
and all instinct with god-like enginery,
she cleaves herself a way through tide
race and current into the very jaws of
the wind, superior in her own informing
energy to the influences both of sun
and moon. She will run to Holyhead
before we shall have finished our ar-
ticle.

But what craft have we here in her wake? one of the revenue cruisersby our word, a clipper. She has but two reefs in her mainsail, and carries both foresail and jib, yet with all, her lee gunnel is as dry as a bone-ah! there she begins to feel the sniffler. That was a nasty one forward, Lieutenant Spanker. Strike your topmast, Lieutenant, if you love us: srtike it home and set your storm jib, or your spars will suffer. What though you have information that the Gull is off Douglas with a cargo of rum, brandy, and tobacco, you need not carry away a stick that cost twenty pounds, for nothing. The Gull can sail round and round you if any thing goes. What! you will carry on in spite of our warning? Deuce take us if he isn't shaking out a reef fore and aft, and laying her two points nearer the wind! Well, if hemp and timber stand that, There! there we told you what would come of it. Was not that a proper smash for you? topmast and bowsprit gone like shanks of pipes, and tugging away by the loose rigging to leeward, till she reels like Saint Vitus drunk. You won't catch the Gull to-day, lieutenant. If we might venture an opinion, we would recommend you to bear up, lieutenant. It is a lucky thing for us both that you do not command a sloop of war, lieu

we are

marines.

tenant: if you did, a steamer would be dispatched from the Thames to tow you to Plymouth for the new sticks; as it is, we hope you will give a day's work to the ship carpenters of Ringsend, lieutenant; and should the Gull escape you, and attempt a landing, we trust she may prove a good seizure to the coast guard, who, like gay fellows, will spend the profits at their station.

But how is it, that sitting here and casting our eyes over the Irish sea, we observe but four sail at a time, and two of these government boats in the offing of our capital's harbour? To be sure, it blows something very near a whole gale of wind; but were we even in such weather looking at Bristol channel (not to speak of the Mersey or the Nore,) we should have a hundred sail in sight, making for port, or passing on their watery ways with broad winged lofty masts, and rich cargoes. Why have we no stout West Indiamen full of sugars, or of pork and salt beef, lying to for pilots, or outward bound with our own exports in return? No cotton-laden Americans-no wine freighted Portuguese-no silk-stuffed Frenchmen? Nothing but a dirty fleet of steamers, paddling across the herring-pond for whatever we want, at third or fourth hand from the merchant princes of Liverpool and London, till our quays look like a poor-house terrace-a paupers' mall-and our customhouse is awaiting, in tenantless decay, the mandate that shall turn it into a great Whig day-school, or a Proclamation printing office. Are our merchants pedlars, our shipping bumboats, have we nothing for it but to turn our dockyards into police barracks, our stores into local courts and penny magazine offices, scuttle our craft, and go ask leave to cut John's harvest? Not so fast-we must have a trip or two to Canton, and cast some dozen hanks round the earth first. There are still some men of enterprise and capital left among us, and, if we be not deceived, more than one Irish Chinaman is already on the stocks. What though the jealous tyrants, who plunder and insult us now, refuse us the making a cable, or the repairing of a damaged capstan, the profits of a single exchange with a foreign country were worth more to us than ten times the same amount of exchequer wageswages of which ourselves must pay a

great proportion out of one pocket into the other. Still, although this be a very equivocal sort of profit, it were no more than right that we should have a proportionate share of it, such as it is; and we consider it much less than fair that we should be cheated out of our rightful proportion as we are. What have the victuallers of Dublin done that their veteran customers of the park should be carried over to the accounts of Chelsea or Greenwich ship chandlers, like so many bad debts on an insolvent's ledger? What have the ship carpenters of Cove done, that the bread should be snatched out of their mouths to stuff down the cheese-encumbered gullets of Plymouth's naval architects? But let us be candid and ask, on the other side, what have the English garrison towns done, that they must lose the custom of ten thousand soldiers, while Irish butchers get the cutting of two or three or four and twenty thousand rations every morning, not to speak of the feeding of a fourth as many police besides? They have been too well behaved: there is no trade now so profitable as disturbance, and this is a great comfort in the midst of our misfortunes, that while our ill conduct forced our own gentry out of the country, it brings us in their place a fair supply of most excellent men and good Christians-British offiNevertheless we acknowledge that could we pacify ourselves into independence of their care, we would gladly forego the equivocal profit and temporary pleasure of their presence for the bona fide and constant good of a resident and exemplary aristocracy. Meanwhile they spend their money among us and keep us from cutting one another's throats at the same time, and we are grateful for the double service. The risk of our being shot with fifty slugs, or ripped up with a dozen case knives, is by their good offices not more at present than doubly hazardous -were they not here, our lives were not worth a Whig's consistency's purchase; and we think our respectable friend, Mr. Pim, would consult the interests of his office strictly enough in estimating that at the value of a bad life of ninety-nine years.

cers.

Would to God we had more James Pims in Ireland. What though he be a Quaker, and lets his tithe be levied by distraint; we owe him the projec

tion and commencement, and hope yet to give him our thanks for the completion and success of the Kingstown railway. There they are, we know not how many hundred able-bodied Irishmen, who, but for that work, might be starving in the Liberty, or plundering in the purlieus of Saint Giles's, delving on like so many pioneers of peace and plenty through hills and over valleys, making the beds of granite that have lain idle since the flood resound to the strokes of pick and jumper, while solid hill-sides move like manageable avalanches from the way of the auspicious work, and shooting down by their own impulse, cast themselves headlong, self-constructed moles, into the curbed and repulsed waters of the sea. It is nine o'clock, and lo! merry as dismissed schoolboys, the light-hearted and heavy-handed labourers (they ask no more dignified name,-" operative" is for the over-fed and under-worked intellectual of an institute,) come tumbling up the bank, laughing and joking, and with many a shrewd poke in the ribs, testifying their mutual goodwill, while wives and children, friends or sweethearts, appear from every lane and pathway with cans and wooden bowls, and brown jugs, all sending up a steam (than which the heavens receive no purer incense,) into the frosty morning air-and now from every ditch-back what a smoke from bowls of porridge and dudeens, what a blessed sound of affectionate voices, what clear laughter and joyous bursts of singing.-Dare we look twenty winters forward? what should we see on the same spot? Shall it share the fate of our other Irish undertakings, of our grand canals, our basins, our cut-stone quays-a moss-grown, crumbling, and silent track, here choked up by overshooting banks, there scarce distinguishable from the yellow sea sand piled round and over it by encroaching tides-ragged ruffians playing pitch and toss in undisturbed security upon its road way, donkeys and lean garrons browsing round its very grass-covered trams? Or shall our delighted eyes behold the level line smooth as a garden walk, its granite sleepers steady as their native rock, and the clean metal rails themselves glaring like our own shoes in the sun; while, ever and anon, increasing from a dark point in the distance to the size of an overhang

ing house-side, down comes the impetuous engine, whizzing and clanking, and fuming like the black drudging demon of an enchanter, and on the sweeping train behind, a king's ransom of Indian and American wealth, bale upon bale, and box on box, piled high as the car of Juggernaut-stout drinking porters swarming like bees round the gateways and buttresses of the depot stores in Dublin, and making a hundred gangways go like spring-boards to their heavy tread, from pier to pier of sweet Dunleary-(of Kingstown, we shonld say; but we would have honoured our monarch by some other mark of loyalty than giving a Yankee nickname to the ancient harbour where he landed,)—while all the broad breast of Killiney resounds to the blasting of the quarryman, the mallet of the stonecutter, and the busy tap of the builder's trowel-merchants bargaining, clerks cyphering, cranes and waggons groaning, and politics forgotten in the happy hurry of universal prosperity? Mr. O'Connell has prophesied that he will see the first-we stake our prophetic pretensions against Mr. O'Connell's, that whatever comes of it, the result will be much more like our second picture. We wish a merry Christmas and a happy new year to Mr. Pim, and hope some time to see him at church.

We have ventured twenty years into futurity, let us venture now not more than twice as many days, and see if we can warm our hands and hearts at the clear Christmas firesides of our countrymen. We kept our Holyeve in the north, and pulled a kail stalk with as much mould at the roots as would have served Sir John Sinclaire for a transplanted oak of half a load of timber. We tried to burn ourselves with Lady Morgan, but although we put the nuts between the prongs of a steel fork, and held them till the metal came to a white heat over the flame of a wax candle, neither would fire. Her ladyship's gases blew out the candle twice, and she finally leaped with wonderful agility from our side, and fell among a plate full of ready named gentlemen, where she blazed away right and left with a brilliancy and warmth that we expected would have set them all in a flame but they were fellows of no kernel. We then tried Mrs. Hemans, (you will not say any thing about it,) and recovered our inflammability from the mo

ment we placed her by our side. The flames burst out, of all colours-blue, green, and white, as the sun at noonday, and mixed and mounted with a loving purity that delighted our very soul when

Fluff! she started up the lum, and left us glowing like a salamander, but not, like that interesting animal, unscathed. We shall not now detain you telling how we played blindman's buff with Anna and Jane, and Eliza and Mary, and how we caught our aunt by the nose, although they all cried "roast beef!" or how we danced a Scotch reel afterwards, and finished with a jig on a trencher, to the admiration of all present, but enter with you the low door of this mud cabin on the confines of Cork and of Tipperary, and see how Christmas is kept in the south. What is this huge fellow without stockings and breeches open at the knee, doing in the far end of the one apartment? sharpening a rusty pike upon the cold hearthstone, and, although it is three o'clock in the day, wetting the accursed work with his fasting spittle! Great God! who hast breathed the breath of life into those nostrils now distended with all the horrid excitement of hunger and hate and brutal fury, and perhaps, ere long, to swim in the bloody agony of violently parted life upon the gallows, grant that this poor wretch may yet remember his noble origin and purpose, and plunging the red instrument of sin and condemnation into the deepest quag of Slievenamoan, forsake for ever his companions and their crimes-for even now, stealing like gaunt wolves from hut and hovel, they are gathering far and near, by tangled glen and sheep track of the mountain to their accustomed rendezvous in the lonely quarries, long unwrought, behind the old church on the hill. And how will they celebrate this, the birthnight of the King of Peace? their looks of baleful expectation answer, as they cast their eyes upon those white chimnies over the distant planting, where the preacher of the Gospel of that Christ is even now sitting among his motherless children, (for the hardships of sudden destitution have killed his wife-and on your head, O Edward Geoffry Stanley, be the blame,) and still with pious gratitude thanking the Giver of the slender fare that makes his Christmas table of this year

Let

a far less plenteous board than was his gatekeeper's of the last. But gatekeeper there is no longer, and the rusted hinges creek no more to the entrance of the pawned and forfeited earriage. Grass grows in all the stalls of his deserted stable; crows build in his kitchen chimney, and frogs eroak upon the damp floor of his broken and empty larder. Yet still, with decent care, he gathers his uncomplaining household (servants and masters no longer different, for all are included in the number of himself and his own children,) to morning and evening prayer, as they have been accustomed to do in better times. His eldest daughter, a fair, marriageable girl, resigned, and ever thoughtful of some kind office or affectionate attention, sits by him now, a baby-sister on her knee, and a little brother playing in happy ignorance of evil by her side. His son, a youth of hot eighteen, threadbare, and even squalid, but still in bearing and manner the unbroken gentleman, has hung his gun, which procured them this day's dinner, over the mantel piece, and talks with melancholy gaiety of his sport and long vacation; a long vacation for him, poor fellow, for he will never again behold the examination hall of Trinity College. What was that noise on the mossy avenue? It was not the baker, for he has threatened not to call again; neither is it the butcher, for he was settled with a month since; surely, it cannot be the post-master from

come to dun them on such a night as this, for the postages of their wearying compensation correspondence with the government? Alas, no! There are there men who have crossed high mountains and wide rivers in the search of blood, and in the blood of this innocent family will their knives be reddened before midnight. In vain the appeal of grey hairs or dishevelled golden ringlets; in vain the desperate struggles of age, deriving old energies from despair, or of youth contending with the courage of young blood and high chivalrous daring to the last; in vain the tender bodies interposed of babes and devoted woman; that last refuge left by legal spoliators to the unhappy Protestant clergyman, reeks with his own and his children's life-blood, while deeds of unutterable horror deform still farther the hideous

scene, even as it fades and vanishes from his glazing eye-balls, The triumphant flames may now thrust their red tongues out of every window, in defiance of all the waters in the black heaven; and when they shall have consumed rafter and king-post, may toss into the sky a volcano of embers round the collapsing crash of floor and ceiling that shall cast their glare, reverberated from hill to valley ten miles round, and tell a whole half barony, that fire and sword have been at their accustomed work of ministerial and apostolic vengeance. Is there no help? Are there no well-disposed neighbours? Why do not the servants of that castellated mansion in the valley throw open their heavy gates and seize the murderous incendiaries? Servants, alas ! there are none, save a decrepid housekeeper and aged gardener, shuddering as they sit in a back parlour of the lonely shut up house of the great absentee lord, who, with lady and honourable sons and daughters, is spending in London or Paris the rents, for whose collection his agent risks the lives of steward and bailiff by the dozen and the score.

"And why," exclaims the ready advocate of Whig economy-" why should the great Lord not be an absentee? I will demonstrate to you by a formula," says he, "that the great Lord's absenteeism does more good than harm to the country; and here is my argument unanswerable. Your absentee at London or Paris 'wants a thousand pounds. He writes his agent to transmit that sum to him from Tipperary, or Kilkenny, or Antrim. His agent will not send gold, for that were running too great a risk of accidental loss, and incurring too great a cost of carriage. Neither will he send bank of Ireland nor bank of England notes, or post bills, for they must cost their exchange or their commission either at one side or the other. Neither will he think of sending the value in produce, which would be absurd, but he manages the matter thus :-he, by a cash lodgment, purchases from his banker a bill of exchange on his London or Paris correspondent, drawn payable at such a date, and in favour of our absentee. Now, you will say, that the difficulty still remains; that our banker must himself remit that cash which he received, or

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