Where shall we pitch our camp? said the Shan Van Voght,

Where shall we pitch our camp? said the Shan Van Voght,

On the curragh of Kildare, and Lord Edward shall be there,

And our pikes in good repair,
Said the Shan Van Voght.

Unfortunately for the expedition, the easterly wind so ardently prayed for, so often invoked in the rebel toast,

A stout heart and mind And an Easterly wind And the Devil behind The Saxon,

failed to assist the adventure, and the French fleet, baffled by fog and foul weather, made its way back to Brest, 'without having landed a single soldier, communicated with the disaffected, or thrown a single musquet on shore.'

Other favorites were "The Wearing of the Green,' with its plaintive melody, 'When Erin First Rose,' and, at a later date, 'The Green above the Red':

And 't is for this we think and toil and knowledge strive to glean,

That we may pull the English Red below the Irish Green,

And leave our sons sweet liberty, and smiling plenty spread

Above the land once dark with blood, the Green

above the Red.

If, nowadays, the Irish poet lacks the incentive which inspired these stirring songs, he need not lament that his occupation is gone. There are other subjects dear to the Celtic heart, and we shall blame not the bard if he turns to the congenial themes Lied, Liebe, and Wein, but rejoice that his laurels need no longer be used 'like the wreath of Harmodius to cover his sword.'

Many of the songs with which my genial old friend Henry Russell, a doyen of entertainers, delighted a former generation are still remembered. He once told me how many songs he had composed and sung during his long many hundreds, but 'I have

career

forgot their number, and think no man should rashly quote,' as Byron said of the Ten Commandments. The best known of Henry Russell's songs are 'Cheer, Boys, Cheer,' the much-parodied

Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I'll protect it now,

'A Life on the Ocean Wave,' and "To the West.' How many folks were induced to seek 'the land of the Free where the mighty Missouri rolls down to the Sea' owing to the appeal of the latter song can never be known. It was popularly supposed to have been one of the most potent incentives to emigration of the Victorian age.

Of the comic songs of other days, who now remembers 'Villikins and His Dinah,' 'All Round My Hat,' 'Jolly Nose,' 'In the Strand,' and Rice's 'Jump, Jim Crow'

Turn about and wheel about and jump just so, Every time I turn about I jump, Jim Crow

all of which were household words in their day?

Most of the comic songs of the Victorian era emanated from the music halls. They were frankly bacchanalian and descriptive of the night side of London life. 'La di Da,' 'Champagne Charley,' 'I Used to Be Steady, I Used to Be Staid,' and that old favorite,

After the opera is over, and after the opera is done,

We gems of the very first water commence our frolic and fun,

are typical examples.

It seems strange that such songs which set forth the nocturnal 'goingson' of the 'swells' of those days used to be rapturously received by the occupants of the pit and gallery, who could, obviously, never aspire to participate in such revels, or claim any connection

with the 'gems of the very first water' whose adventures were so alluringly set before them.

Others there were more general in their appeal-'Up in a Balloon,' Charley Godfrey's 'On Guard,' and 'Cabby Knows His Fare,' and two military ditties, "The Captian with His Whiskers' and

Cerulia was beautiful, Cerulia was fair,

She lived with her mother in Bloomsbury Square;

But all her sweet charms, alas! are not for me, She's playing kissi, kissi, with an officer in the artillerie.

There must be many still with us who will be pleased to recall that in their youth they delighted, shall we say, their families and friends with "Two Lovely Black Eyes':

Strolling so happy down Bethnal Green,
This gay youth you might have seen,
Tomkins and I with his girl between,
Oh! what a surprise!

I praised the Conservatives frank and free,
Tomkins got angry so speedilee,

All in a moment he handed to me
Two lovely black eyes!

Two lovely black eyes, oh! what a surprise! Only for telling a man he was wrong, two lovely black eyes.

Next time I argued I thought it best
To give the Conservatives' side a rest,
The merits of Gladstone I freely press'd,
When oh! what a surprise!

The chap I had met was a Tory true,
Nothing the Liberals right could do,
This was my share of that argument too
Two lovely black eyes!

(Chorus) Two lovely black eyes, etc.

The moral you've caught, I can hardly doubt:
Never on politics rave and shout;
Leave it to others to fight it out,

If you would be wise.

Better, far better, it is to let

Lib'rals and Tories alone, you bet,
Unless you're willing and anxious to get
Two lovely black eyes!

(Chorus) Two lovely black eyes, etc.

And the ballad of 'Nancy Lee':

Of all the wives as e'er you know, Yeo-ho! lads, ho! Yeo-ho! yeo-ho! There's none like Nancy Lee, I trow, Yeo-ho! lads, ho! Yeo-ho!

See there she stands and waves her hands upon the quay,

An' every day when I'm away she'll watch for

me,

An' whisper low, when tempests blow, for Jack

at sea.

Yeo-ho! lads, ho! Yeo-ho!

The sailor's wife the sailor's star shall be,
Yeo-ho! we go, across the sea;
The sailor's wife the sailor's star shall be,
The sailor's wife his star shall be.

Two prime favorites some forty years ago were 'Ballyhooley' and 'Killaloe,' Irish ditties, and there must be many who were men about town in those days who will remember the Gardenia Club, where, in the small hours, bright shone the lamps o'er fair women and brave men.' There nightly their author, genial Bob Martin, was to be found singing them with inimitable esprit.

The Gardenia was a most amusing rendezvous. It was run by the erratic D. W., who introduced to its patrons those celebrated danseuses from the Casino de Paris, La Golue and La Sautrelle, and the talented young lady who stood on her hands and picked up pins from the floor with her eyelids. There would be found, too, a nobleman whose ancestor saved us from invasion in the spacious days of the Virgin Queen, T. C., who became a mighty hunter of congealed mammoths, and C. B., whose coach with 'Connie' on the box was one of the features of a London season.

"The Convict's Farewell,' a slang song in the play of Janet Pride, circa 1870, was a really humorous production; the concluding verse is a fair sample:

Now all you young wi-counts and duchesses,
Take warning by wot I've to say,
And mind all your own wot you touches is,
Or you'll jine us in Bottinny Bay.

In the days of the Regency slang and flash songs were, in the language of the Corinthians, 'all the go,' and Lord Byron's corporeal pastor and master, 'Gentleman' Jackson the pugilist, was credited with the authorship of one from which the following is an excerpt:

On the high toby splice flash the muzzle,
In spite of each gallows, old scout,

If you at the spellkin can't hustle

You'll be nobbled in making a clout. Then your blowing will wax gallows haughty, When she hears for your scaly mistake She'll surely turn snitch for the forty

That her Jack may be regular weight.

Lord Byron frequently mentioned Jackson with approval and esteem, in both his published works and his correspondence, and was often to be seen walking and driving with the well-known pugilist, of whom a contemporary writer said, 'He was the admiration of all the women, and the envy of all the men.' It is recorded of the poet that when he was at Cambridge his tutor ventured to remonstrate with him, and indicated an impropriety in his being seen so frequently in public with a prize-fighter. To this protest Byron characteristically replied: 'Jackson's manners are infinitely superior to those of the fellows of the College

whom I meet at the high table.'

In old days ballads and glees such as the 'Chough and Crow' and

Come out, 't is now September, the hunter's moon's begun,

And through the wheaten stubble is heard the frequent gun

used to be great favorites at Evans's. Evans's was Thackeray's 'Cave of Harmony,' and there it was that old Costigan offended Colonel Newcome by the singing of an obscene song, which evoked some scathing remarks from the latter, and caused his dignified retirement when 'the uplifted cane of the Colonel seemed somehow to have fallen on the back of every man in the room.'

Nurses used to be famous repositories of old songs; mine had a store of such, and before I could read I was acquainted with the sorrows of the 'miller's lovely daughter,' the cruelty of Barbara Allen, Highland Laddie, and the dilatory swain who promised to buy his sweetheart a bunch of blue ribbons to tie up her bonnie brown hair.

Nowadays nurses do not sing these old songs. I gather that they do not sing at all to their charges, and the next generation will know nothing of them. For it is not the artificial stimulus of the concert or drawing-room which enables old songs to survive; if they are not remembered of the people, they perish.

There are few elderly folks to whom ories of bygone days, and perhaps their some song does not bring back memeyes may get a little dim when they hear the echoes of 'When Other Lips,' through the medium of a barrel organ or 'Juanita,' though maybe only on some autumn evening when the leaves are falling and thoughts slide back to the past and the time when

There was nothing half so sweet in life As love's young dream.

DON CELESTINO, his shoes freshly shined, was sitting on the terrace of a café. I found him established here at one o'clock, with a glass of water in front of him, playing at being a Spaniard. His wrinkled hands, his pointed finger nails, his exquisite feet, and his slender thighs proclaimed him a veritable hidalgo. He was surrounded by a mess of rubbish, flies, and little boys. The last were stationed in front of him begging him to allow them to take the piece of sugar he had left in his saucer. All were pointing their forefingers at the piece of sugar so that there could be no doubt as to why they were on hand. With the patience of an Oriental, Don Celestino did not chase away either the children or the flies.

'Don Celestino,' I said, as I sat down beside him, 'what do you, as a Spaniard, think of our Carmen?'

'Carmen?' - he pronounced the word 'Carmé.' 'We laughed prodigiously the other day when a French troupe presented it in Madrid. The funniest part was where the person who acted Carmen began to dance.'

'Well, what about the music?' 'It is n't real Spanish music at all. It's a sad kind of music.'

Sad! I thought of a certain Moor, the racial brother of this Don Celestino, who had also told me that European music seemed sad to him. We had played him fox-trots at top speed, and he had felt that all of them were sad. No doubt he thought that the monoto

1 From Les Nouvelles Littéraires (Paris literary weekly), January 15

nous twanging of his native guembri was full of wild gayety.

'But it is Mérimée's Carmen that interests me. What does the Spanish public think of that?'

"They think nothing whatever about it.'

'But how about you? Have you read the story?'

'Perfectamente.' There was one more syllable in the word than in 'perfectly, but it was somehow much nearer 'perfection.' 'I know all your famous authors- Bourget, Maupassant, Eouhénio Soué.'

'Bravo! Eugène Sue! That's splendid. But listen: I have been requested to write a preface to an illustrated edition of Carmen. It seems that this shy little venture of Mérimée's cannot make its way in the world without the guiding hand of an elder brother to help it along. The only thing is, Don Celestino, that when I am in your country I have a terrible desire to do only what is agreeable. To reread Carmen and to evoke from it the same old clichés does not fall into this category. So tell me what you think of Carmen yourself, and I shall simply write down your remarks, and have time for some heavy flirting. Ah! I am always thinking of the chrysanthemums in the patio of the University here. Tall as picadors, but thicker around the middle, suggesting —'

'Claro.'

"There are the professors at the University, who feel the influence of these chrysanthemums so keenly that

they can never shut themselves up with their books, but prefer to remain in Madrid and appoint substitutes. Then the substitutes come under the influence of these chrysanthemums and feel that they can never do their work either, so they despairingly set forth on trips around the world. The students

but I have gone far enough. It all proves how difficult it is to think when you have a chance to play.'

What a justification of my words lay before our eyes. How pleasant it was to see those charming faces passing and repassing before us, like snatches of music one remembers. The people in the streets here do not look as if they were going anywhere, as Americans do. They have no rolls of documents stuffed under their arms, like Frenchmen. If Don Celestino has to carry business papers with him, he does not take quite enough to make his pockets bulge the rest will have to wait. In this country you never see fountain pens sticking out of pockets, or pencils either. People here do not try to give the impression that they are working. Where life is beautiful and people are beautiful, leisure and not work is sacred, because only in an atmosphere of leisure can one breathe.

they seem

Little Zurbarán saints to have walked out of the neighboring museum parade back and forth. Graceful little women of the world with voices of astonishing force - proud Matilda; Inez, a little less so; Marina, who makes a real effort to be humble; Catalina, inclined to pose too much; Eulalia, who is bored; simple Dorotea; and Barbara, who must presently be consoled - not a minute must be lost. Then the young men with slender legs, white jackets, and rings on their fingers. They are so dark that I imagine they must be wearing in their right ear the kind of silver ring that Moors are in the habit of giving to their favorite chil

dren. They are a slender race, and know how to show off their figures to best advantage. In the midst of all this crowd a dog is sleeping quietly, coiled up and serene. Little children jump over him, and older people walk around him, to keep from disturbing his repose.

'Carmen,' announced Don Celestino, 'is a bitter book for a Spaniard to read, and it shows that a Frenchman, either consciously or unconsciously, can speak only evil of Spain.'

Carmen? I remember it as being written in a tone of the greatest friendship for Spain.'

'A fine friendship! The typical Spanish soldier, Don José, is represented as a deserter, a smuggler, brigand, and assassin. The typical Spanish girl, Carmen, is unfaithful, dishonest, shameless, and commits murder by intention, not by accident. The old Spanish lady is a sorceress who extends hospitality to a criminal. Spanish children are dressed in "filthy rags" I remember those very words. And you expect people to respect a nation which a friend describes in these terms? Faced with these monsters, the French scholar reveals himself as a generous man: he refuses to betray the bandit. Even the Englishman is described as brave and clever, full of spirit and all the rest of it. None of your writers has ever visited us without immediately spewing out a mess of calumnies. Théophile Gautier, Barrès