Page:Life of John Boyle O'Reilly.djvu/275

Rh This dish of dear old memories long gone by, And sets it here before us,—like that pie, That dainty dish whose every blackbird sings. Ah me! It minds us we have all been kings.

After some mock-heroic references to the Papyrian dynasty, he continues:

Aye, aye, we wander! we are garrulous grown! How strange—in Billy Park's—we eight alone— ("Alon " is Irish for no more, to-night; 'Tis better to be Irish than be right.)

"All are here,"he says; then, as if remembering for the first time their well-beloved first president, Dodge, he says:

Hush! One Is absent,—he the merriest, he the youngest. Where Is that dear friend who filled this empty chair? One vacant place! Alas, the years have sped! That gulf was bridged with rainbow and 'tis fled. Ah, boys, we can't go back! that chair forbids— But to his memory now, with brimming lids. We drink a toast,—"May he with genii dwell!" And when we go may we be loved as well.

We have been generals, — what is now our style! Old stagers we to form new rank and file; Or have we any meaning, but to meet. Like ancient villagers, with tottering feet. Who love to sit together in the sun, With senile gossip till their day is done?

And so the verses run on, through good-humored nonsense and banter, all of a personal character, and "not intended for publication," winding up with an absurd transition to plain prose.

On Friday, January 18, 1884, John Edward Kelly, one of the Hougoumont political convicts, died in the City Hospital, Boston, in the prime of his manhood. He was one of the Irish Protestants who had fought bravely in the brief Fenian uprising. A native of Kinsale, Ireland, he had emigrated with his parents to Nova Scotia in early youth, and, while still a lad, came to Boston. In 1863 he