muse deals gently with the dead.
James Devlin, where are you old man,
Whose fingers o'er the catgut ran?
Professor of the art to foil
Both "treason, stratagem and spoil,"
In days which now are but a riddle,
When William Murphy played the fiddle
So merrily, long, long ago,
To trip of "light fantastic toe."
Fond were you of the rod and line
When sport and profit did combine
In other days, when mighty Bass
And Pickerel lay upon the grass
Beside you, as with practised hand,
You hauled the scaly kings to land
Night-lines and gill-nets, may they be
Accurst--have ruined you and me!
And left us nought but "tommy cods"
As trophies for our idle rods.
Who is he with such pompous air--
Such magic curl of scented hair,
With glass stuck tightly o'er one eye
To scan the common passer by,
While every air betokens well
The presence of a "howling swell?"
'Tis Henry Howard Burgess, O!
To him Dundreary's self were slow.
And Thomas Burgess, too, was here,
A swell, though not quite so severe.
And the two Johnston's, born twins,
As like each other as two pins,
Clerks in the Ordnance Office were
And surely a most proper pair.
John Grant, too, who quite early came,
A constable of ancient fame,
Who kept the peace, right well, 'tis true,
When he had nothing else to do.
Few were the summonses he got,
Warrants fell seldom to his lot;
The town was not by courts infested,
People liked not to be arrested,
And seldom were--for to the Ring
Complainants did their troubles bring,
And there found justice, sometimes too much
Redress, of which they oft did rue much.
J.B. Lavois, with thee I close
My lengthy memories of those
I knew of old in Lower Town,
Though last, not least in size, I own.
A butcher of the olden time,
Who furnished roasts and steaks most prime,
In the old George Street Market House,
Where cats held many a grand carouse,
Ere rats to Bytown emigrated
In swarms pestiferous and hated.
And if I have forgotten one,
Whom memory could not fasten on,
Let him feel no neglecting smart,
I have not passed him with my heart,
I've done my best 'neath friendship's spoil,
So Lower Bytown now farewell!

UPPER TOWN.

CHAPTER I.

And now, kind reader, westward ho!
Across the Sappers' Bridge we go;
When first in youth I cross'd it o'er,
The arch was wood, "and nothing more"--
As Edgar A. Poe doth remark
About that raven big and dark--
The wooden span, I mean, stretched o'er
The channel's width from shore to shore,