ad everywhere the reputation of a
shrewd and thriving community. They were the first in New England to
cultivate the potato, which their neighbors for a long time regarded as a
pernicious root, altogether unfit for a Christian stomach. Every lover
of that invaluable esculent has reason to remember with gratitude the
settlers of Londonderry.

Their moral acclimation in Ireland had not been without its effect upon
their character. Side by side with a Presbyterianism as austere as that
of John Knox had grown up something of the wild Milesian humor, love of
convivial excitement and merry-making. Their long prayers and fierce
zeal in behalf of orthodox tenets only served, in the eyes of their
Puritan neighbors, to make more glaring still the scandal of their marked
social irregularities. It became a common saying in the region round
about that "the Derry Presbyterians would never give up a pint of
doctrine or a pint of rum." Their second minister was an old scarred
fighter, who had signalized himself in the stout defence of Londonderry,
when James II. and his Papists were thundering at its gates. Agreeably
to his death-bed directions, his old fellow-soldiers, in their leathern
doublets and battered steel caps, bore him to his grave, firing over him
the same rusty muskets which had swept down rank after rank of the men of
Amalek at the Derry siege.

Erelong the celebrated Derry fair was established, in imitation of those
with which they had been familiar in Ireland. Thither annually came all
manner of horse-jockeys and pedlers, gentlemen and beggars, fortune-
tellers, wrestlers, dancers and fiddlers, gay young farmers and buxom
maidens. Strong drink abounded. They who had good-naturedly wrestled
and joked together in the morning not unfrequently closed the day with a
fight, until, like the revellers of Donnybrook,

"Their hearts were soft with whiskey,
And their heads were soft with blows."

A wild, frolicking, drinking, fiddling, courting, horse-racing, riotous
merry-making,--a sort of Protestant carnival, relaxing the grimness of
Puritanism for leagues around it.

In the midst of such a community, and partaking of all its influences,
Robert Dinsmore, the author of the poem I have quoted, was born, about
the middle of the last century. His paternal ancestor, John, younger son
of a Laird of Achenmead, who left the banks of the Tweed for the green
fertility of Northern Ireland, had