my parents had taken a house at dalkey, with a garden a dream of delights, that ran by shadowy slopes and bosky alleys down to the grey rocks where the sea seemed to become our very own, as it rolled over the rocks, and made, from time to time, when the tide ran high, little pools along the sanded fringes of the garden. the house was large and rambling, and of a night when the waves roared and the artillery of the heavens shook at the foundations of earth, it afforded us enormous gratifications of every kind. we were fascinated by terror, and shuddered in silence during the long nights when our parents were kept in town by a theatre, a race, a party. then we were left in the charge of our eldest sister, a young person of a sentimental and despotic turn of mind. she ruled us with a rod of iron, then invited us to weep with her over the poems of adelaide ann procter. and while she read to us in a tremor of eager[pg 208] sensibilities the legend of provence, she ruthlessly confiscated "waverley," "kenilworth," "rob roy," which i kept under my pillow, and read aloud at night to my younger sisters. novels she held to be the kernel of every iniquity under the sun, but longfellow and adelaide ann procter were the sole ennobling influences of life. she was sustained in this crooked conviction by a pensive little stitcher, who used to come and sew and mend for us all several hours a-week, and could recite in their entirety "evangeline" and the "golden legend."
a quaint and original figure this white-haired, sad-eyed little stitcher. she had had her romance, stranger than evangeline's. her lover had gone to america, and had fought in the federal war. with a few savings, she followed him across the atlantic, and sought him out in state after state, walking several leagues a-day, with lifts here and there in waggons, subsisting for months on a daily crust and a root or two, to end her dolorous peregrinations in a hospital with her dying lover's head upon her faithful breast. she returned to ireland the heroine of a real novel, with black hair bleached and eyes dim from weeping. she had won the right to be cheerless, and stand with flowing eyes "on[pg 209] the bridge at midnight," and tell us "in mournful numbers life is but an empty dream."
we were a wild lot, no doubt, and worked wonders in villainy and mischief. even our sister's sentimentality at times succumbed to our monstrous spirits; and she forgot longfellow and miss procter, to drop into irish farce. all the houses round about us were filled with boys and girls of all ages up to sixteen. we needed no introduction to form a general family of some thirty or forty vagrants and imps of both sexes.
the head of the troop was a red-headed youth, destined to adorn the medical profession, and a pale proud-looking boy of fourteen, my first love, arthur by name, of an exalted family, and now, i believe, a distinguished colonel. when we joined the boys on the cricket-field, i always picked up his balls and handed them to him reverentially, and my reward was to be told in an offhand way that "i was a nice little thing." to me he was quentin durward, waverley, with a dash of leicester and prince ferdinand. he certainly was quite as haughty-looking and distinguished as any of these decorative heroes. his father, an amiable, high-mannered old lord, sometimes treated us to fireworks; and then his sisters, prouder than ever cinderella's could[pg 210] have been, would come out and smile down benevolently upon us all, with the air of court-ladies distributing prizes at a village festival. arthur himself was a very simple boy, extremely flattered by my mute adoration, which he encouraged by all sorts of little airs and man?uvres.
it was the red-headed leader who invented the most delightful entertainment in the world. he formed us into a band of beggars. he played a banjo and sang nigger songs, and arthur, in shirt-sleeves, with a rakish cap rowdily posed on his aristocratic flaxen head, went round with a hat to gather coin. we went from house to house, an excited troop of young rascals, sang and danced and begged and shouted in each garden until the grown-up people appeared and flung a sixpence, sometimes even a shilling, into arthur's hat. the old lord occasionally rose to half-a-crown. the parents enjoyed the fun as much as we did, and never pretended to recognise us.
what tales we invented! what lies we told! one pretty little girl, with brown ringlets round the rosiest of faces, won a half-sovereign from my stepfather, who was smoking on the lawn when the band invaded his solitude, by assuring[pg 211] his honour that she was "the mother of fourteen children, with their bed-clothes on her back." when she flung the sparkling piece into arthur's hat, he shouted "gold!" and a frantic cheer went up from the band. we rushed off in a joyous body next day to killiney hill, and had a feast of lemonade and oranges, and toffee and cake. the red-haired chief paid the bill with a flourish, and if there was any change he kept it.
each parent took his turn in providing the company with an official feast. the old lord monopolised the fireworks. my stepfather instituted races. a wealthy barrister, our neighbour, inveigled a circus for our delectation; and seven delightful old maids, who lived in a kind of castle of their own, outdid all the fathers royally by a regatta of our own. all the boatmen of dalkey were hired, and each boat ran up a sail. mighty powers! what a day that was. were ever youngsters so gratified, so excited, so conscious of being a little community apart, with the sea and the land for its entertainment?
and there was an amiable old judge, who offered us the freedom of his big orchard, where the apples grew in quantities, and we climbed the trees like squirrels, and devoured fruit without fear or restraint.
