ly the
sad experience of life can lend a sad soul.

The Gridiron.

BY SAMUEL LOVER.

Samuel Lover was born in Dublin in 1797. As a novelist he
was one of the most popular of the period in which he lived.
He is acknowledged to have written the best Irish peasant
sketches and the best Irish peasant songs in the language.
Lover was the son of a Dublin stock-broker, who attempted to
prepare his son for that business. At the age of seventeen,
however, the boy turned his back on the office, and, with
his scanty savings, he took up the study of art. Three years
later he began to win success as a painter of miniatures. An
admirable miniature of Paganini painted by Lover excited so
much attention in London that the young artist was induced
to go to the metropolis. There he spent a considerable part
of his time in literary work.

"The Gridiron" was one of his first productions. His
three-volume novel, "Rory O'More," appeared in 1836. This
was dramatized and met with such success that its versatile
author for a time devoted himself to playwriting. He also
wrote the words and music of several operettas. As a song
writer he now became one of the most popular in the United
Kingdom.

On the day that Victoria was crowned Queen of England she
was escorted to Buckingham Palace to the strains of "Rory
O'More." His most popular novel was "Handy Andy." Lover
visited the United States in 1846. He died in 1868. Besides
his literary talent, he possessed a high degree of musical
ability. Among Samuel Lover's descendants is Victor Herbert,
the well-known musical director and composer.

A certain old gentleman in the west of Ireland, whose love of the
ridiculous quite equaled his taste for claret and fox-hunting, was wont,
upon certain festive occasions, when opportunity offered, to amuse his
friends by drawing out one of his servants who was exceedingly fond of
what he termed his "thravels," and in whom a good deal of whim, some queer
stories, and, perhaps more than all, long and faithful services, had
established a right of loquacity.

He was one of those few trusty and privileged domestics, who, if his
master unheedingly uttered a rash thing in a fit of passion, would venture
to set him right.

If the squire said, "I'll turn that rascal off," my friend Pat would say,
"throth you won't, sir"; and Pat was always right, f