I waited by the door, Classic door! out they pour, A score, Or more, Escorting her, I say! And ha! may I be blest, Upon each jerkin breast, Confest, Were drest, The buds of my bouquet! Said she to me "ta ta! Go home to your mamma!" It wrought the rude evanishment Of love of her from me! The moral it is this, Don't dally with such bliss, A miss, Is kiss Unto thee from the play, A kiss for gods, and stall, The pit, and tier, on all To fall And small The fig, for your bouquet, When it has brought the balm, Of the applauding palm, She shares it with the supers, and She gives the chill to thee! [Illustration] [Illustration: The Girl of Castlebar] THE sun was setting in a gloam of purple and gold, as I basked in the grass on the Staball hill one autumn evening, the stirring tuck of the tattoo rolled up the slope from the adjacent barracks; it affected me like a tonic, my blood circulated quicker, the spirit of an amateur ghostly seer took possession of me! I felt as one inspired. A scene of early days of Anglo-foreign strife rose before me like a wraith of second sight. The tramp of sea-bound red coats, fifes and drums, the woe-mongering cries of parting wives. I saw two lovers on the Staball hill, heard their vows. A rhyming fever tingled to my fingers' ends, my only manuscript medium to hand, the stump of a lead pencil, and blank margin of the morning paper. Upon that virgin border I jotted the sketch of the following founded on fact ballad. The reader will perceive in it a beautiful inverse lesson of the mutual commotion of two loving hearts. THE bugle horn was sounding through the streets of Castlebar, And many a gallant soldier, was bound unto the war, And one upon the Staball hill, his sweetheart by his side Swore many a rounded warlike oath, that she should be his bride. "O Maggie!" cried the Corporal, "There's war across the sea, And when I'm parted from thee, I would you'd pray for me, And I will tell you what you'll do, when I am far away, You'll come up to the Staball, and kneel for me, and pray." And this to him she promised, and this to him she said, "I'll still be ever true to thee, be thou alive, or dead! I'll still be ever true to thee, and O if thou dost fall, Thy soul at eve will find me here, upon the old Staball." And then he swore a clinker oath, of what a vengeful doom, Would him befal, who dared to win her from him, then the bloom Came to her cheek again, "O Jim I'll never love but you," "I'm blowed but I'm the same!" he cried, and then they tore in two! [Illustration]