he was seized and dragged towards a Police-Office; revolting against the ill-usage, he promised to follow the man if he would precede him; and was thus led to the Station, brought before a blustering sergeant, interrogated, and, refusing to give his name, locked up! After a considerable time he was released, and his name, being surrendered, was thereupon written down in the list of petty offenders. As he passed out, the ragged children congregated about the doors jeered at him. He had never felt so crestfallen and degraded. Ashamed to tell his disgrace, unwilling to wound his parents with the knowledge of it, he walked about for hours in sullen loneliness; and was for a long time inconsolable; nor in the ear of mortal save one youthful confidant did he breathe the galling secret till many years had passed.

A change again to another school-then a celebrated one in Dublin-introduced him to new companions; and it must be confessed that he now became as wild as a young schoolboy could well be.

Learning his ordinary lessons with ease, he was content with such school-successes as were to be won whenever the studious or ambitious mood might happen to visit him. A passionate desire for knowledge perpetually swayed him; but it was now chiefly those books which happened to captivate his imagination that he read with attention; and he was just one of those boys that puzzle

a school-master's brains to know what to do with, being much too advanced for the classes adapted to their years, and yet not mechanical in their habits of study. Such boys are generally forced onward, to their own misfortune. He never came

home without a prize from any school examination. His essays were always commended, and created surprise by their vigour, and depth, and humour. But just at this time he was, as I have said, a wild boy, who thought, perhaps, more of frolic and adventure, and of what he and his playfellows called devilment (a word more godless in sound than in signification), than of school-books and prizes. At this period his companions became numerous and various, and he was quite as much a favourite with his masters as with his schoolfellows. Some of the latter are now distinguished men; some, like himself, have passed away. The survivors well remember the boisterous pastimes of those days, the ringing of bells, and knocking at doors, and breaking of windows, and extinguishing of street-lamps, the robbing of orchards, the fights between rival schools, the explorations of the thieves' quarters of the town. And yet, at the same time, he was exercising his musical talents in composing chants and glorias, some of which were performed in a church, in the choir of which he now habitually sang with notable clear contralto! His frolic was

the overflow of joyous health and exuberant animal spirits; and even his companions recognized in him a something which distinguished him from other boys. "He was, indeed," writes one of them, "one of my earliest friends, and one of the few men whom, among many acquaintances, I could look up to and respect. . . Dear Edmund was a great favourite with every one . . . If you knew how fondly I loved [him], and how proud I felt of every step he took, as reflecting some credit even on me, you would not be surprised at this expression of my feelings."

In the group of his companions were two-like most of the rest, some years older than himself— whose society had for him a peculiar charm. They had been born and brought up in their grandfather's house on the spurs of one of the Dublin Mountains, commanding a beautiful prospect of the wooded and well-cultivated Midland Plain, with the city-spires rising above the tree-tops, the wide bay of Dublin with its purple headland to the northward, and the blue, sail-dotted Channel stretching to the eastern horizon. The demesne, like many another in Ireland, had changed hands; but the boys had still stories to tell of their childhood passed there, of the adventures of their elder brothers (doubtless exaggerated and coloured by imagination), of wild incidents of highway robberies, and other moving themes, associated with the neighbourhood and

с

transmitted from the "dark backward and abysm of time." Walter F****, the elder of these two brothers, was a gentle, amiable lad, with a considerable fund of humour, and a great love for the alienated home on the mountain. Thither he sometimes acted as leader in delightful walks, and the old Park, and the wide fields on the slopes, and the rough mountain-top beyond, became very familiar ground. To Armstrong these rambles were beyond measure welcome, and they served just at that time to stimulate his love of nature which the rough schoolboy frolics might have tended in a measure, perhaps, to blunt and restrain. The walks which he took in company with his boyfriends, he would take over again, with various divergences, by himself; and while the others remained true to their common system of rough amusements, he was gradually, unperceived by himself or by them, developing widely different and antagonistic tastes and ideas. And just at this moment events occurred which accelerated that growth.

War was declared against Russia. To him, whose attachment to soldiers was so warm and personal, whose earliest and cherished ambition was so strongly bent towards a military life, whose imagination was so active and vivid, and whose sympathies were so painfully keen, this war-the first he had known-was a cause of the intensest

agitation. The departure of certain of the ill-fated regiments which took part in the campaign he has himself described in his poem Ovoca. Of several of the incidents there depicted he was an eyewitness. No regiment left Dublin for the seat of war without his walking side by side with it as far as he could go. Several squadrons of the Light Brigade, which took part in the charge of Balaklava, went direct from Ireland. The 11th Hussars had been stationed in Dublin for a considerable time, and many of the men's faces and voices were as familiar to him as those of his own schoolfellows. I remember well his look of pain as he grasped in his hand a little gift which one of the poor fellows had presented to a young lad as a keepsake the night before he left, to return never again. I remember the coldness creeping over my own body, and the feeling of utter bleakness and desolation, as we walked together through the empty barrack-squares the day after they had gone. I remember the bitter partings of those days, the wild cries, the long crowds accompanying the regiments, the faces of the brave fellows under their busbies and helmets, the shouts, the cheers

"In which the hearts of those that cried

Sickened within them."

I remember it all, and the events which followed it. I was younger than he by several years, yet it