A BLOKE FROM MULLINGAR.

I met him nearly farthest out— No matter when or where. He carried in his ragged clothes A kind of city air. I said, “I’ve just been wondering The devil who you are?” And he replied, in broken tones, “I’m all that’s left of Billy Jones, The beau of Mullingar!” “Brush up! brash up! my friend,” I cried, “And bear it like a man. Why, look at me, I’ve battled through From Beersheba to Dan; And yet may do the ‘buffer’ trick When Fortune’s bogies jar, And shade the truth From callow youth Who hail from Mullingar! “Come, trot inside this shanty door! This out-back mulga hell! Where all our finer thoughts are damned, And e’en our worst rebel. But still when deathly monotone Spreads over land and star, Here, broken men Oft dream again Of some old Mullingar!” He sighed, and took my hand in his— The kind of flaccid clasp That rankles through one’s very soul And tears it like a rasp— “Ah, yes, that talk is right enough Beside a shanty bar; But I’ve,” he said, And bowed his head, “A girl in Mullingar!” “Remember this,” I laughed, “my lad! The brave alone may win— To her we’ll chink, where’er she be, One foaming pannikin, For Cupid’s cunning shafts, my lad, They carry fast and far; And girls are true To me and you, In hell—or Mullingar!

“Come, sink another pot to her! A wizened soul and white Would falter in its tracks by day, And in its core by night. For I, too, twenty years ago, Beneath a luckless star, Left, in a rage, Life’s heritage Behind at Mullingar!” “Oh, yes,” he chortled with a sneer, “I know, I know your kind Of out-back bloke who babbles of The girl he left behind— Her face was quite a beauty show, Her voice like a guitar. I guess,” he grinned, “The kind of wind Blew you from Mullingar! “For city men, like me, may read The lying lines between, Of blokes who bruise with hob-nailed feet Love’s field of evergreen— The car wherein your goddess drives May be Aspasia’s car!” I hit him solid, fair and square, And left the wastrel lying there— That bloke from Mullingar.