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having diddled Davy Jones, a rainy night with a blind moon.
Across the world for a wife. Quite a number of stories there
were on that particular Alice Ben Bolt topic, Enoch Arden
and Rip van Winkle and does anybody hereabouts remem-
ber Caoc O’Leary, a favourite and most trying declamation
piece by the way of poor John Casey and a bit of perfect
poetry in its own small way. Never about the runaway wife
coming back, however much devoted to the absentee. The
face at the window! Judge of his astonishment when he fi-
nally did breast the tape and the awful truth dawned upon
him anent his better half, wrecked in his affections. You
little expected me but I’ve come to stay and make a fresh
start. There she sits, a grasswidow, at the selfsame fireside.
Believes me dead, rocked in the cradle of the deep. And
there sits uncle Chubb or Tomkin, as the case might be, the
publican of the Crown and Anchor, in shirtsleeves, eating
rumpsteak and onions. No chair for father. Broo! The wind!
Her brandnew arrival is on her knee, post mortem child.
With a high ro! and a randy ro! and my galloping tearing
tandy, O! Bow to the inevitable. Grin and bear it. I remain
with much love your brokenhearted husband D B Murphy.
The sailor, who scarcely seemed to be a Dublin resident,
turned to one of the jarvies with the request:
—You don’t happen to have such a thing as a spare chaw
about you?
The jarvey addressed as it happened had not but the
keeper took a die of plug from his good jacket hanging on a
nail and the desired object was passed from hand to hand.
—Thank you, the sailor said.