THE CURSE OF KISHOGUE. 279 



folks of Plymouth, how, think you, Plato would 

 have rendered it Greece V^ 



" Flato reasoned welly ^ said my cheerful friend. 

 " He was classical you will admit, and must have 

 winged classically. The performances which neither 

 drew the attention nor gained the approbation of his 

 maturity, he destroyed. Thus perished his early 

 writings for such as the world and himself might 

 approve : but," continued he, '^ what is the object to 

 which you allude ? " 



" The Lambhay bell-post," said I — " or by meto- 

 nomy — the Lambhay Bell." 



Here my friend laughed and I laughed — we both 

 laughed — ^fbr our play was a mental play^ — a sort of 

 bo-peep skipping from the sublime to the ridiculous 

 — but neither was disposed to have a war of words, 

 nor seem, to the other's disadvantage, hyper-criti- 

 cal ; for smoke and sound had rivetted us to more 

 engaging, though not more gratifying recollections ; 

 while home and household — love and labour — arose 

 as necessary substitutes for the mind's reveries on 

 our Athos — Staddon's steepy Heights. 



J. R. B. 



THE CURSE OF KISHOGUE. 



You see there was wanst a mighty dacent boy, called Kishogue 

 ^ — and not a complater chap was in the siven parishes nor himself 

 — and for drinkin' or coortin' (and by the same token he was a 

 darlint among the girls, he was so bowld), or cudgellin', or runnin,' 

 or wrastlin' or the like o' that, none could come near him; and 

 at patthern, or fair, or the dance, or the wake, Kishogue was the 

 flower of the flock. Well, to be sure, the gentlemen iv the 

 counthry did not belove him so well as his own sort — that is the 

 eldherly gintlemen, for as to the young 'squires, by gor they 

 loved him like one of themselves, and bether almost, for they 

 knew well that Kishogue was the boy to put them up to all sorts 

 and sizes of divelment and divarshin, and that was all they 

 wanted —but the owld, studdy (steady) gintlemen— the respon- 



