Thither, to our grim despair, went forth the Belles from Tralee; and, by the bones of St. Lumbago of Sciatica, I could have plunged into the flood, and followed in their lee, had I not been cognisant of a certain “alacrity in sinking,” which prevents the simultaneous removal of both my legs from the bottom. What would I not have given, to have changed places with the coxswain! I should have felt proud and happy as he who steered the immortal Seven at Henley, or as Edgar the Peaceable, when, keeping his court at Chester, and having a mind to go by water to the monastery of St. John Baptist, he was rowed down the Dee in a barge by eight Kings, himself sitting at the helm. 1
We mourned awhile, but the spirit of youth endures not to sorrow long. It bends low, but it will not break. It rises again in all its freshness after a glass of bitter beer, or just a mouthful of whiskey; and we soon looked our affliction in the face like men, and played the nightingale upon our empty bottles. I have studied somewhat sedulously to imitate, with a moistened cork upon glass, “de nightingirl, de lark, de trush” (as the ever-to-be-retained Von Joel hath it), and the performance was so successful, that two finches perched, attentively, within a yard of our heads, while the boatmen listened as admiringly as the Australian Diggers to the English lark; 2 and a newly-mar-ried couple, deliciously embowered above us, conversed as they sat on the green, and said, that “they had never quite believed the assertion that Ireland had no nightingales.” But Frank, unhappily, dispelled all these allusions, by trying his unpractised hand, and by educing such irregular and feeble chirpings, as would have disgraced a superannuated sparrow, or a tom-tit, hopelessly wrestling with an aggravated form of diphtheria.
2 See the exquisite description in _It is Never too Lute to Mend,_ p. 359.
The trees, beneath whose melancholy boughs we had our meal and music, had been disgracefully hacked! and more foul copies of “_the Initials_” were to be found here (with woodcuts, calf, lettered) than in all Mr. Mudie's Library. If I had my will, I would teach those trenchant snobs, who, wherever they go, dishonour England, to sing their “_Through the Wood, Laddie_,” to a much more doleful tune, made fast for a few hours in the stocks; or I would endeavour so far to revive in their breasts (if they have any breasts), that Druidical veneration for Baal, which once prevailed in Ireland, and which would induce them to cut _themselves_ with their knives, and to worship the trees instead of whittling them. Or, in illustration of another Druidical tenet, metempsychosis, it would be gratifying to see their transmigration into woodpeckers, condemned for ever, like the bird in the fable, to seek their food between bark and bole.