Chapter 2

‘Mercy craved and mercy foundBetween the saddle and the ground.’”

‘Mercy craved and mercy found

Between the saddle and the ground.’”

The old man replied not, but shook his head, indicating his determination to die without the consolations of religion, whilst Terry trembled for his hopeless situation.

“Well, since you won’t have the priest, will you give me some money till I bring you the doctor?” said Terry.

The old man’s eyes literally flashed fire, his form heaved with rage, and his countenance displayed demoniac indignation.

“What’s that you say?” he demanded in a ferocious tone.

Terry repeated the question.

“Send for a doctor!—give you money!” echoed the old man. “Where the devil would I get money to pay a doctor?”

“You have it, and ten times as much,” said Terry, “and you cannot deny it.”

“If I have as much money as would buy me a coffin,” said the Boccough, “may my soul never rest quiet in the grave.”

Terry crossed his brow with terror. He knew the unhappy wretch was dying with a lie on his tongue, but he resolved not to press the matter further.

“You are dying as fast as you can,” remarked Terry; “have you any thing to say before you go?”

“Nothing,” replied he faintly. “But let me be buried with my red nightcap on me.”

“Your wish must be granted,” said Terry, and he went to awake his old mother, who still lay asleep. When he returned, he found the old man breathing his last. He uttered a convulsive groan, and expired.

He was washed and stretched, and waked, with all the honours, rites, and ceremonies belonging to a genuine Irishwake; and on the third day following, being the Sabbath, he was followed to the grave by crowds of the village peasantry, who remained in the churchyard until they saw his remains deposited, as they thought for ever, in the rank soil of the “City of the Dead.”

Many rumours were now current respecting the Boccough’s money. Every one but Terry believed that the “lob” fell with Terry himself. But Terry, who knew better, believed and affirmed that “what was got under the devil’s belly, always goes over his back,” and that the “old boy” had taken the spoil, and that it lay concealed in some crevice in the bank of the river.

The night following the burial of the old sailor was passed in a very disturbed and agitated manner by Terry O’Shea: he could not sleep a wink; and when he fell into a slumber, he started and moaned, and appeared frightened and annoyed.

“What ails you?” affectionately demanded his old mother, who slept in the same room, and who was kept awake by her son’s restless and disturbed manner.

“I don’t know, mother,” said Terry; “I am so frightened and tormented with dreaming of the Boccough Ruadh, that I am almost out of my natural senses. Even at this moment I think I see him walking the room before me.”

“Holy Mary, protect us!” ejaculated the old woman. “And it is no wonder that his misforthunate soul would be star-gazing about—and to die without the priest, and a curse and a lie in his mouth!”

Terry groaned agitatedly.

“And how does he appear in your dreams?” asked the old woman.

“As he always was,” replied Terry. “But I think I see him pointing to his red nightcap, and endeavouring to pull it off with his old withered hand.”

“Umph!” said the old woman, in a knowing tone. “Ha! ha! I have it now. Are you sure that the strings of his nightcap were unloosed before he was nailed up in the coffin?”

“I don’t know,” was the reply.

“I’ll go bail they weren’t,” said the old woman; “and you know, or at any rate you ought to know, that a corpse can never rest in the grave when there is a knot or a tie upon any thing belonging to its grave-dress.”

Terry emitted another deep groan.

“Well,acushla,” said the old mother, “go to-morrow, and take a neighbour with you, and open the grave, and see if any thing be asthray. If you find the nightcap or any thing else not as it should be, set it to rights, and close the grave again decently, and he will trouble you no more.”

“God send,” was Terry’s brief but emphatic response.

Early next morning Terry was at the Boccough’s grave, accompanied by a man of the neighbourhood. The coffin was opened, the corpse examined, and, according to the mother’s prediction, the red nightcap was found knotted tightly under the dead man’s chin. Terry proceeded to unloosen it, and in the act of doing so, a corner of the nightcap gave way, and out peeped a shining golden guinea.

“Ah ha!” mentally exclaimed Terry, “that’s no blind nut any how; there’s more where that was, but I had better keep a hard cheek!” So, without seeming to appear any way affected, he opened the knot, closed the coffin, shut up the grave, and departed homewards, without acquainting his comrade with what he had seen.

The moment Terry entered his own door, he told his mother about the guinea, and expressed his determination to go that very night, and fetch the red nightcap home with him, “body and bones and all,” “for,” added he, “that guinea has its comrade; and I’ll hold you a halfpenny there’s where the old dog has the ‘lob’ concealed, and that’s what made him order me to have the red cap buried with him.”

“Asthore machree,” said the mother doubtingly, “won’t you be afraid?”

“Afraid!” echoed Terry, “devil a bit—afraid indeed! and my fortune perhaps in the red nightcap.”

The mother consented, but enjoined him to tell nobody about the matter for fear of disappointment. Terry vowed implicit obedience, and retired to his usual avocations in the garden.

Well, at last the night came, and Terry set about preparing for his strange undertaking. All the arts and prayers and charms of old Kathleen were put in requisition to preserve him from danger; and about the witching hour of twelve, with his spade on his shoulder, and his dhudeen in his mouth, the bold-hearted Terry set forward all alone to the grave-yard, shaping his course by the winding banks of the glassy river, and whistling as he went—not “for want of thought,” however, for never was man’s mind more busily occupied than was Terry’s, in predisposing of the money which he expected to find in the Boccough Ruadh’s nightcap.

After a short walk, Terry arrived at the precincts of the churchyard. It was a lovely summer’s night, the full moon shining gloriously, and myriads of pretty stars blinking and twinkling in the blue expanse, but all their native lustre was drowned in the borrowed splendour of the Queen of Heaven. Terry stood a moment to reconnoitre, and, resting on his spade, looked around with an anxious gaze. He could discover nothing; all was silent as the departed beneath his feet, except the murmuring of the river’s surges in the rear, or the barking of some village cur-dog in the hazy distance. He advanced to the grave of the Boccough, and in a few minutes the ghastly moonbeams shone full on the pale grim features of the dead. He snatched the nightcap quickly from the bald head of the corpse, put it in his pocket, and, notwithstanding the awe and superhuman terror under which he laboured, he chuckled with delight as he remarked the “deadweight” of the Boccough’s head-gear. He then closed the coffin, and as he proceeded to cover it, the clay and stones fell on it with an appalling and unearthly sound. The grave now covered up, the intrepid fellow again shouldered his spade, and sought the river’s margin, and as he strode hurriedly along its banks in the direction of his home, the splash of the otter and the diving of the water-hen more than once broke the thread of his lonely musings.

Terry was soon at his mother’s side, who since his departure had been on her knees, praying for his safe return. The nightcap was ripped up, and lo! three hundred golden guineas were the reward of Terry’s churchyard adventure! Stitched carefully in every part of the huge nightcap, the gold lay secure, so as not to attract the notice of any one, or cause the least suspicion of its proximity to the old man’s pericranium.

Terry and his mother were in ecstacies. Farms were already purchased in ideality, cattle bought, houses built, and even Terry began in his mind to make preparations for his wedding with Onny Kinshellagh, a rich farmer’s daughter of the neighbourhood, for whom he had breathed many a hopeless sigh, and who, in addition to her beauty, was possessed of fifty pounds in hard gold, a couple of good yearlings, and a feather-bed as broad as the “nine acres.”

The mother and son retired to bed, as happy as the certain possession of wealth, and the almost as certain expectations of honour and distinction, could make them. After a long time spent in constructing and condemning schemes for the future, Terry fell asleep. He had not slept long, however, when he started up with a loud scream, crying out, “the Boccough! the Boccough!” “Och, weary’s on him for a Boccough!” exclaimed the mother; “is he coming for the nightcap and the goold?”

“Oh, no,” said Terry, calmly; “but I was again dreaming of him, and I was frightened.”

“What did you dream to-night?” asked the old woman.

“I was dreaming that I was going over the foord by moonlight, and that I saw the Boccough walking on the water towards me; that he stopped at a certain big stone, and began to examine under with his hands; that I came up, and asked him what he was searching for, when he looked up with a frightful phiz, and cried out in a horrible voice, ‘For my red nightcap!’”

“God Almighty never opened one door but he opened two,” exclaimed old Kathleen. “Examine under that stone to-morrow, and by all the cottoners in Cork, you’ll find another ‘lob’ of money in it.”

“Faix, maybe so,” replied Terry; “it’s no harm to say ‘Godsend,’ and that God may make a thief of you before aliar.”

“Amen,achiernah,” replied Kathleen.

Next morning at daybreak, Terry got up, and proceeded to the identical stone where he fancied that he had seen the spirit of the Boccough. He examined it closely, and after a strict search, discovered in the sand beneath the rock a leathern pouch full of money. He seized it joyfully, and on counting its contents, found it amounted to upwards of a hundred pounds, all in silver and copper coins.

“What a lucky born man you are, Terry O’Shea!” cried the overjoyed gold-finder, “and what a bright day it was foryour family that the Boccough Ruadh crossed over the waters of the Nore.”

“It was not a bright day at all, but a wild, gloomy, stormy night,” said the old woman, who, unperceived, had followed her son to watch the success of his expedition.

“No matter for that,” said Terry; “there never was so bright a day in your seven generations as that dark night; I am now the richest man of my name, and I would not, this mortal minute, call Lord De Vesci my uncle.”

It is easier for the reader to imagine than for the writer to describe the manner in which this joyful day was passed by the happy mother and son. Now counting and examining the gold, and again proposing plans, and considering the best purposes to which it could be applied, they passed the hours until the summer sun had long sunk behind the crimson west.

Terry was again in bed, when he started with a wild shriek. “Mother of mercy!” he frantically vociferated, “here is the Boccough Ruadh; I hear the tramp of his wooden leg on the floor.”

“Lord save us!” said the old woman in a trembling voice, “what can ail him now? Maybe it’s more money he has hid somewhere else.”

“Oh, do you hear how he rattles about! Devil akippeenin the cabin but he will destroy,” exclaimed poor Terry. “It’s the black day to us that ever we seen himself or his dirty thrash of money; and if God saves me till morning, I’ll go back and lave every rap ov id where I got it.”

“That would be a murdher to lave so much fine money moulding in the clay, and so many in want of it; you shall do no such thing,” said the mother.

“I don’t care a straw for that,” said Terry. “I would not have the ould sinner, God rest his sowl, stravagin’ every other night about my honest decent cabin for all the goold in the Queen’s County.”

“Well, then,” says the old woman, “go to the priest in the morning, and leave him the money, and let him dispose of it as he likes for the good of the ould vagabond’s misforthunate soul.”

This plan was agreed to, and the conversation dropt. The ghost of the Boccough still rattled and clanked about the house. He never ceased stumping about, from the kitchen to the room, and from the room to the kitchen. Pots and pans, plates and pitchers, were tossed here and there; the dog was kicked, the cat was mauled, and even the raked-up fire was lashed out of the “gree-sough.” In fact, Terry declared that if the devil or Captain Rock was about the place, there couldn’t be more noise than there was that night with the Boccough’s ghost, and this continued without intermission until the bell of Abbeyleix castle clock was tolling the midnight hour.

Terry was up next morning at sunrise, and having packed up the money which was the cause of all his trouble in his mother’s check apron, proceeded with a heavy heart to the residence of the priest, about two miles from the present Poor-man’s Bridge. The priest was not up when Terry arrived, but being well known to the domestics, he was admitted to his bed-chamber.

“You have started early,” said the priest; “what troubles you now, Terry?”

Terry gave a full and true account of his troubles, and concluded by telling him that he brought him the money to dispose of it as he thought best.

“I won’t have any thing to do with it,” said the Father. “It is not mine, so you may take it back again the same road.”

“Not a rap of it will ever go my road again,” said Terry. “Can’t you give it for his unfortunate ould sowl?”

“I’ll have no hand in it,” said the priest.

“Nor I either,” said Terry. “I wouldn’t have the ould miserpolthogueingabout my quiet floor another night for the king’s ransom.”

“Well, take it to your landlord; he is a magistrate, and he will have it put to some public works connected with the county,” said the priest.

“Bad luck to the lord or lady I’ll ever take it to,” said Terry, making a spring, and bounding down the stairs, leaving the money, apron and all, on the floor at the priest’s bedside.

“Come back, come back!” shouted the Father in a towering passion.

“Good morning to your ravirince,” said Terry, as he flew with the swiftness of a mountain deer over the common before the priest’s door. “Ay, go back, indeed; catch ould birds with chaff. You have the money now, and you may make a bog or a dog of it, whichever you plaise.”

In an hour after, the priest’s servant man was on the road to Maryborough, mounted on the priest’s own black gelding, with a sealed parcel containing the Boccough’s money strapped in a portmanteau behind him, and a letter to the treasurer of the Queen’s County grand jury, detailing the curious circumstances by which it came into his possession, and recommending him to convert it to whatever purpose the gentlemen of the county should deem most expedient.

The summer assizes came on in a few days, and the matter was brought before the grand jury, who agreed to expend the money in constructing a stone bridge over the ford where it was collected.

Before that day twelvemonth, the ford had disappeared, and a noble bridge of seven arches spanned the sparkling waters of the Nore, which is here pretty broad and of considerable depth. From that day to this it is called the “Poor-man’s Bridge,” and I never cross it without thinking of the strange circumstances which led to its erection.

The spirit of the Boccough Ruadh never troubled Terry O’Shea after, but often, as people say, amid the gloom of a winter’s night, or the grey haze of a summer’s evening, may the figure of a wan and decrepid old man with his head enveloped in a red nightcap, be seen wandering about Poor-man’s Bridge, or walking quite “natural” over the glassy waters of the transparent Nore.

[3]That imaginary region under ground, supposed by the peasantry to be the residence of spirits and fairies.[4]The red beggarman.[5]Anglice, the Stone of the Cripple, or the stone of the beggarman. This stone lay for many years in the position it occupied in the days of the “Boccough,” but is now incorporated in the stonework of the parapet of the bridge. It was believed to be enchanted, and the peasantry of the neighbourhood used to affirm that it descended to the river to drink, every night at the hour of twelve o’clock. This belief is now almost exploded, but however it is affirmed to be the identical stone on which the Boccough collected his wealth.[6]This is a very ancient churchyard, situated on a gentle eminence overhanging the western bank of the river Nore, and about half a mile from Poor-man’s Bridge. The ruins of a church or monastic establishment still remain in the centre of the grave-yard. It is said to have been erected by St Comgall, from whom it took the name of Cell-Comgall, thoughnowcalled Shankill, or Shannakill. St Comgall was born in Ulster in 516, and was educated under St Fintan, in the monastery of Clonenagh, near Mountrath, in the Queen’s County. He died on the 10th of May 601.[7]The bier or hand-carriage on which the dead are borne to the grave.

[3]That imaginary region under ground, supposed by the peasantry to be the residence of spirits and fairies.

[4]The red beggarman.

[5]Anglice, the Stone of the Cripple, or the stone of the beggarman. This stone lay for many years in the position it occupied in the days of the “Boccough,” but is now incorporated in the stonework of the parapet of the bridge. It was believed to be enchanted, and the peasantry of the neighbourhood used to affirm that it descended to the river to drink, every night at the hour of twelve o’clock. This belief is now almost exploded, but however it is affirmed to be the identical stone on which the Boccough collected his wealth.

[6]This is a very ancient churchyard, situated on a gentle eminence overhanging the western bank of the river Nore, and about half a mile from Poor-man’s Bridge. The ruins of a church or monastic establishment still remain in the centre of the grave-yard. It is said to have been erected by St Comgall, from whom it took the name of Cell-Comgall, thoughnowcalled Shankill, or Shannakill. St Comgall was born in Ulster in 516, and was educated under St Fintan, in the monastery of Clonenagh, near Mountrath, in the Queen’s County. He died on the 10th of May 601.

[7]The bier or hand-carriage on which the dead are borne to the grave.

An Excuse.—Miravaux was one day accosted by a sturdy beggar, who asked alms of him. “How is this,” inquired Miravaux, “that a lusty fellow like you is unemployed?” “Ah!” replied the beggar, looking very piteously at him, “if you did but know how lazy I am!” The reply was so ludicrous and unexpected, that Miravaux gave the varlet a piece of silver.

An Incident.—At the time Commodore Elliot commanded the navy at Norfolk (I think it was), happening to be conducting a number of ladies and gentlemen who were visiting the yard, he chanced to see a little boy who had a basket full of chips, which he had gathered in the yard; probably to show his importance he saluted him, and asked where he got the chips. “In the yard,” replied the boy. “Then drop them,” said the brave man. The little boy dropped the chips as he was ordered, and after gaining a safe distance, turning round with his thumb to his nose, said, “That is the first prize you ever took, any how!”

Solon enacted, that children who did not maintain their parents in old age, when in want, should be branded with infamy, and lose the privilege of citizens; he, however, excepted from the rule those children whom their parents had taught no trade, nor provided with other means of procuring a livelihood. It was a proverb of the Jews, that he who did not bring up his son to a trade, brought him up as a thief.

If there be a lot on earth worthy of envy, it is that of a man, good and tender-hearted, who beholds his own creation in the happiness of all those who surround him. Let him who would be happy strive to encircle himself with happy beings. Let the happiness of his family be the incessant object of his thoughts. Let him divine the sorrows and anticipate the wishes of his friends.

A cheerful heart paints the world as it finds it, like a sunny landscape; the morbid mind depicts it like a sterile wilderness, palled with thick vapours, and dark as “the shadow of death.” It is the mirror, in short, on which it is caught, which lends to the face of nature the aspect of its own turbulence or tranquillity.

The lazy, the dissipated, and the fearful, should patiently see the active and the bold pass by them in the course. They must bring down their pretensions to the level of their talents. Those who have not energy to work must learn to be humble.—Sharp’s Essays.

Printed and published every Saturday byGunnandCameron, at the Office of the General Advertiser, No. 6, Church Lane, College Green, Dublin.—Agents:—R. Groombridge, Panyer Alley, Paternoster Row, London;SimmsandDinham, Exchange Street, Manchester;C. Davies, North John Street, Liverpool;J. Drake, Birmingham;Slocombe & Simms, Leeds;FraserandCrawford, George Street, Edinburgh; andDavid Robertson, Trongate, Glasgow.

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