on the father's tomb, and leave him to the
possibility of ever thinking that the present words
might have righted the father's memory and were
left unwritten. He cannot know that his own
son may have to explain his father when folly or
malice can wound his heart no more, and leave
this task undone.

TWO DEAD MEN'S STORIES.

LET us call the first dead man John Cartridge,
of whom, from a penny class-book, the other day
picked up on a Holborn stall, the following
particulars are learned: Served in the Peninsula,
and after the battle of Toulouse, in 1814, landed,
under welcoming salute, in the bright Cove of
Cork, with his regiment, the 2nd——, in August
in that year. As a sketch of Irish manners at this
period, the little forgotten class-book, from which
we extract, in a condensed form, Cartridge's
military experiences— valuable chiefly as an
honest man's uncoloured relations— is not without
interest.

From Cork the regiment marched to Fermoy,
and Cartridge, lagging behind his companions,
came suddenly, at a turn of the road, on a
countryman driving a cart with a coffin in it.
No neighbour was with them, no mourner
followed the ghastly funeral but one old woman,
who, with the grey hair about her face, clung to
the vehicle while she shrieked out the keening
dirge with a wild cry that the wind bore to an
incredible distance.

It was an Irish lad who had turned king's
evidence, and brought two of his own relations
to the gallows by becoming witness against
them on a charge of taking arms from the house
of a gentleman in which they had all three been
engaged. The wretch had never been happy nor
had thriven after this cowardly treachery, and
died of fever the day before Cartridge met his
body. No neighbour would attend the wake;
the traitor died accursed; the broken-hearted
father drove his son's body to its nameless grave;
the broken-hearted mother shrieked out the
burial song, the only voice raised to lament
him.

At the villages as they went along, Cartridge
and his fellows found the rebellious peasants
unwilling to give them billet. At one place, they
were shown into a mud cabin without a chimney,
and the woman drove out the pig from its lair by
the fireside to make a bed for the "sogers."
"Come away, honeys, you're welcome; it is
yees I was waiting for," the virago said,
ironically; and when, snatching up her special stick,
she drove the pig from its straw, it broke out
like a wild-boar, and upset every infantry man
it met; the woman's cry as the men moved off
disgusted, was, "Och, is that the way you are
going to leave me, and me a poor widdy?"

That night, in the whisky-shop where Cartridge
lodged, the landlord told them that Judy
O'Brien (the woman) was no friend to the
soldiers, for she had lost two brave boys in the
rebellion. There had been a time when Judy
had been a great champion for her faction, and
at one fair which seemed likely to end without
a fight, Judy took off her jock, and holding it
by one sleeve, trailed it after her, crying out that
the blood of the Murphys was turned to buttermilk,
and shouting, "Come, you chicken-hearted
rogues, let me see the thief's breed of a Murphy
that will dare to put his foot on my jock." As
she brandished her stick the people laughed, and
some one threw a dead rat in her face. This
fired her blood; she instantly knocked the nearest
Murphy down, and a fight ensued that beat
anything that was ever seen, and Judy was there
to the last.

At Waterford, where Cartridge was next
quartered, he found the Orangemen raving still
about '98, when the Papists burnt Scullabogue
and piked the Protestants on the wooden bridge.
"Better up to the knees in blood," said the
Orangemen, "than let the roaring lion of
Popery loose."

Cartridge and his comrades were all this time
worried by being sent in perpetual detachments
to disturbed villages, to protect constables, and
to act as body-guards to bailiffs. The frightened
authorities were always bringing to the barracks
cock-and-bull stories of great meetings of
Shanavests in the fields, and of intended
massacres, all exaggerated by party hatred and
terror. If a cabin was set on fire, they swore a
village was burnt; if one man was wounded, he
changed into a dozen dead Protestants. As for
the magistrates, they were either timid and
time-serving, or irritating alarmists, who
persecuted and hunted about the people till they
were goaded into resistance. Some barbarous
deeds were committed by the Shanavests and the
Caravats, but chiefly against oppressors and
unjust landlords. They were divided, however,
into parties, who sometimes met and fought
during the great hurling matches, and the spies
among them were innumerable. One day a
blacksmith, who had been beaten by some
Shanavests for daring to ask for money earned in
repairing some rebel muskets, went at once to
the magistrate, gave in a list of all the men who
had arms, and the notice requiring their
surrender was stuck up at the cross-roads. The
notice brought in only a few, the rest, which
had been taken by force at night from Royalists,
were hid; but Barny, the smith, took the
soldiers to the drain where forty stand of
blunderbusses were hid. From this time, however,
Barny, the smith, had to live at the barrack, and
eventually, for fear of the Croppies' guns, to
voluntarily transport himself from his ungrateful
country. Revenge was generally the aim of the
Shanavests, but most of the gangs had professional
robbers and housebreakers associated with
the patriots and murderers.

Cartridge was present at the trial of a
ringleader, a rough peasant, who had united both
virtues— that of burglary with that of murder.
He stood at the bar, bold, audacious, and
unflinching. There was circumstantial evidence
of his guilt, but the blood had long since been
washed off his hands, and unless some one more