Irish Jesuit Province

A Key to "Dublin Acrostics"Source: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 28, No. 328 (Oct., 1900), pp. 604-605Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20499660 .

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604 The Irish Monthly

that I'm not grateful for your goodness, but now that the old man is gone it does not matter what'11 become of me. I'm going to the House this evening; Mick Byrne is to come for me in the donkey cart, an' I've told his wife she can have the bits of things. I won't be here long, sir, an' it doesn't much matter where I ends my days. I'm thankful that the old man died in his own little place, an' with some one to look after him to the last, but 'twould go to my heart to be more comfortable now that he's gone than we were in his lifetime. So, if your reverence won't think me ungrateful, I'd rather go to the House."

And that evening Mrs. Sheehan, taking leave of her old home and her old neighbours, went in Mick Byrne's donkey cart to the workhouse, whose heavy gates shut her in, as it seemed to her for ever, from everything connected with her former life.

IKATHARINE IROCHE.

A KEY TO " DUBLIN ACROSTICS."

LAST month, by mistake, we proposed to our readers an acrostic that had been already solved into its component

parts grape and shell, with the lights glass, ranch, amice, pail, and

eisel.

Of the stanzas which follow the two first of course describe the "upriglhts," and the third those two in combination. Few could have made better poetry out of these materials than the grave president of Maynooth has here done.

No. 121.

I.

I bend o'er my dekI- with troubled mien.

With straining eyes and aching brow,

As I think of the hopes so fair yestreen.

But alas ! all dark and lowering now.

O'er balance and debit I sadly pore:

Day-book and ledger-I scan them all.

I list, at each click of the opening door,

How fitful markets rise and fall.

Yet, wbhen misfortunes darkest lower,

And care comes weariest to mne,

Give me only my first one breezy hour,

Anid my hleart grows light and my spirit free.

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A Tale qf a Lady and a Song. 605

II.

My second, while yet the world was new,

Was art's first gift to man;

And men to-day the craft pursue

With new device and plan.

See, neath the engine's ponderous shaft,

The lengthening roll expand,

And grow, as with instinctive craft,

At the touch of a viewless hand!

I staunch the warrior's bleeding vein,

With sure though slender band,

The struggling captive flies in vain

From the clasp of my ruthless hand.

In the lifting mist of morning tide,

I ride on the sleepy air,

And the laughing sunbeams glint aside

From the sheen of my streaming hair.

Yet I lurk in the nook of the lonely wall

Mid solitude and gloom,

Unmoved and grim, while my victims fall

In the gaping jaws of doom.

1. I herald the early dawn.

2. I come when the cloth is drawn.

3. I lurk 'neath the flowery lawn.

C. W.

A TALE OF A LADY AND A SONG.

QNCE upon a time a lady dwelt within a high-walled garden.

Alone, save for her flowers, the flying things that came and went, and God's fair sunshine that is high enough to look over even the very highest walls. Many birds came from other gardens near, and gardens afar off, and perched on her trees and sang of the things they had seen.

But one day a bird came and sang a song so fine, that the

lady, bending over her flowers, stood up to listen, for it was a song of the wide seas, and the lady had a great longing to capture

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