Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/108

 and Germany. The volume was received with enthusiasm, went into a second and third edition as fast as they could be printed, and into a sixth edition within the year, and since has not only run into more than fifty editions, circulating, the publishers affirmed, more copies than any book published in Ireland since the Union, but has become in time the foundation of a large library of ballad poetry framed in the same spirit. It was in this little volume that the bulk of Irish readers became acquainted for the first time with Ferguson's "Willy Gilliland," Banim's "Soggarth Aroon," Lady Dufferin's "Irish Emigrant," Gerald Griffin's "Orange and Green," Furlong's "Drunkard," Mangan's "Kathleen ni Houlahan," and the Ulster ballad of "Willy Reilly," and many others, which have since become as familiar to Irish readers as the "Shan Van Vocht." The third volume projected was a "Life of Wolfe Tone," by Thomas Davis, but a calamity as unforeseen as an earthquake ruined that project, and many other noble works from the same hand. A little later a social club, with