that dance, ma'am. Will ye be quiet, there, ye tasin' divils? Ma'am, spake a word or two to Paudheen, and inthrate him to lave off ticklin' my nose. Curse o' Cromwell on ye, and lave the bottle alone-what's it doin' to ye? Can't ye thry and behave like Christhins-eh, can't ye?"

At a wave of the Queen's hand the elves desisted.

"There's the Queen of Hearts," she said; "mind, she'll be jealous o' me, Mike."

"Troth, thin, 'tis ill would become her. Is she spliced yet? I suppose ould Bullock Heart is her husband."

Diamonds was about to reply, when her royal sister seated herself at her side, and thus prevented Mike's curiosity from being gratified. At a signal from the Queen of Clubs, the whole company threw themselves in various positions on the grass; and as the Knave of Diamonds clapped his hands, the ground opened, and a round table, heaped with a sumptuous banquet, rose in their midst. To all solicitations to eat and make merry, Mike, who remembered the warning of the captive in the bottle, gave a firm but respectful refusal.

"Thry some of our blackberry jam?" asked the Queen of Spades.

"Shall I send you a lark's leg, darlint?” said the Queen of Hearts.

“Or a juicy slice from the sirloin of frog?" suggested the King of Clubs.

"I ax your pardons all round," said Mike, "but I couldn't ate another morsel."

As Mike said this, he felt a tiny head laid lovingly on his shoulder, and heard the Queen of Hearts whisper:

"Ah, thin, Mr. Driscoll, were you ever coortin' ?"

66

'Why, thin, not to say much, ma'am. There was a girl o' the Bradys that I had a likin' for, and was goin' to be married to her, till we fell out about a feather-bed and a goat. We wouldn't give, and they wouldn't take, and there was an ind of it."

The Queen sighed. "And did you never love any one since, Mr. Driscoll ?”

"Begor, thin, I'm afeard I did," replied Mike; "greatly afeard itself."

"Her name wasn't Brady, Mike—was it ?"

66 'Begor, thin, yer right enough, ma'am, it wasn't Brady; 'twas the-the-'

"The what, darlint ?"

"Why, 'twas the Queen o' Hearts, ma'am;" and as Mike made this terrible confession, he wound his arm round the Queen's neck, and imprinted a kiss on her cheek with so much vehemence that the report resounded like a clap of thunder over the locality. Kings, queens, knaves and commoners sprang to their feet. "Treason!" "Revenge!" "Kill him!" 66 Sting him to death!" were the first cries which arose from the tumult. "Tie his heels together," cried the Knave of Hearts, "and hang him out o' the moon.'

Give us a garter, Peggy," said the King of Hearts to his wife.

The lady parted with the ligature with evident unwillingness, and Mike's ankles were bound together in a trice. A cold sweat burst out through the pores of his body, and he grew powerless in the presence of the terrible doom which he had earned by his rashness. In vain he remonstrated, pleaded and wept. A power he was unable to resist lifted him on the backs of four gigantic bats, and in three seconds he was being whirled towards the moon, attended by all the fairy company. The planet was reached in less than ten minutes, and Mick felt almost sick to death from the smell of stale cheese that pervaded the atmosphere.

Hang him to this corner," cried the King of Hearts. "We'll let him see he don't kiss our wife for nothing."

"She can have it back, if 'twill please your majesty,” said Mike. "I mint no harm."

"Here's a nice crumbledy corner to tie him to; 'twill break away in an hour, and then he'll be made porridge of," roared the Knave of Hearts.

A suitable spot was at length selected, and Mike, hanging head

downwards between earth and heaven, was left swinging about in a storm which agitated the lonely lunar regions. Far below he could see the world, and, when the wind lulled, could catch the roar of the Falls. His head grew dizzy, his heart sank within him, and, clasping his hands together, he exclaimed, "May the Lord have mercy on me. The words had not died on his lips when the corner of the moon he was hooked to snapped off, and he fell-down deeper, and deeper, and deeper! The stars shot past him, as he descended with the velocity of an aerolite; and, before he had time to bless himself, he alighted, with a great bound, on the world, narrowly escaping a plunge into the roaring Falls. He started up, he rubbed his eyes-what was this? Where was the moon? and where were his tormentors? He was lying in the middle of the "Fairies' Wake," on the identical spot where he had taken the last draught of whisky on returning homeward. Everything was quiet, not a leaf stirred; it was long past midnight, and the full, round moon of Christmas had begun to set. Looking up to the descending planet, he exclaimed, "'Twas a power of a fall intirely. I wondher was the bottle broke !" An examination of his pocket convinced him that it had not sustained a fracture; and, to his astonishment, the cards were all safe, and tightly packed together. "Afther all," he soliloquized, "I was only dhramin'; but old brogues to me, if I play cards agin in a hurry—Sunday or Monday, or holiday, aither. What the deuce has got into the bottle ?" Holding the flask between his eyes and the light, he perceived something moving up and down the inside. For a moment he was convinced that it was the spectral child, who had warned him to reject all offers of food and drink from the fairies, but, breaking the vessel, he discovered that it was only a field frog. Stiff and sore in every joint, he rose up and plodded homewards.

"You see, Mike," said his mother, when he had recounted in detail the experiences of the night, "that there's nayther luck nor grace in card-playin', for if you had gone where you ought, the Good People couldn't trouble you."

"Thrue enough, mother," he replied; "but wait till I go

card-playin' agin, and you'll be diggin' the praties on New Year's Day."

"There, go where ye ought to go," he exclaimed, throwing the new cards into the fire. "It's moighty plain that people who ride steeplechases on bats and dine on frog sirloins aren't fit company for honest Christians. And, mother, ye'll never agin have to fall out wid me about my duty; and here, may the Lord send us all A HUNDRED HAPPY CHRISTMASES."

TOM KEARNEY.

Some two score years ago, or over, on the road to Coal Island, in the county of Tyrone, lived Jack McConnaughey, the blacksmith. I remember him well, and his appearance. To the shoulders he was about middle height, but his exceedingly long, thin, scraggy neck, made him fully two or three inches taller.

Jack was a prudent, careful, and extremely frugal soul, who regarded any kind of waste on his premises as an unpardonable sin. Yet he did not stand very high in the esteem of his neighbors; they failed utterly to award him either merit or respect for his saving virtues; on the contrary, they designated him "a miserable old crig." He had a simple simpering manner withal that indicated anything but the skinflint he really was. In the words of Tom Kearney, who was once his journeyman, "Jack was very soft about the mouth till you came to feel his teeth." Tom, however, was somewhat prejudiced in the matter, as the reader most likely will find out.

Jack never married, and there were those who were ill-natured enough to regard the fact as a wise and beneficent stroke of Providence. It was said that he had an old stocking hid away somewhere, and upon it all his affections concentrated and into it went every sovereign, half-crown and shilling his anvil yielded. Even the priest declared he "could not get a rap out of him but the bare dues that he couldn't help." His sister Nancy kept his house, and was said to be the counterpart of Jack himself, but Tom Kearney insisted that, bad as Jack was, Nancy was ten times

worse.