Produced by Punch, or the London Charivari, Wayne Hammond, Malcolm Farmer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI VOL 93 December 3rd 1887 THE LETTER-BAG OF TOBY, M.P. +From the Lord Mayor of Dublin.+ _Mansion House, Dublin, Saturday_. +Dear Toby+, The news from Ireland, not all of which finds its way into your daily papers, grows in excitement. The exploit of Mr. +Douglas P-ne+, M.P., of Lisfinny Castle, has taken root, and all the landed gentry among the Irish Members are fortifying themselves in their castles, and hanging themselves outside the front-door by ropes to deliver addresses to their constituents. The regular thing now is to hang out our M.P.'s on the outer wall. I do not see accounts of these proceedings in your London papers. I was, as you know, a Journalist before I was Lord Mayor; so, if you don't mind, I'll send you a few jottings. If there is anything due for lineage, please remit it anonymously to the Land League Fund "From A Sympathiser." Foremost in this band of heroic patriots is the _châtelain_ of Butlerstown, +Joseph G-ll-s B-gg-r+, M.P., Butlerstown Castle, as everyone acquainted with Ireland knows, stands on the summit of a Danish rath, and was once the seat of an +O'Toole+. Now it is the den of +Joseph G-ll-s+. For some time he has been practising a flying leap from the eastern to the western turret, a distance of fifty feet over a yawning abyss, amid the cavernous depths of which the petulant plummet has played in vain. It is thrilling, whether at early dawn, or what time the darkening wing of Night begins to flap, to hear a shrill cry of "Hear, hear!" to see a well-known figure cleaving the astonished air, and to behold +Joseph G-ll-s+, erewhile upright on the eastern turret, prone on that which lifts its head nearer the setting sun. To be present on one of the occasions when +Joey B+. reads a Blue Book for three hours to a deputation shivering in the moat, is enough to convince the dullest Saxon of the hopelessness of enthralling a nation which has given birth to such as he. As +Joseph+ himself says, quoting, with slight variation, my own immortal verse,-- "Whether on the turret high, Or in the moat not dry, What matter if for Ireland dear we talk!"