the neighbours were sunk in their own misery; why should anyone come knocking like that, unless it were an angel bringing help? Trembling, he opened the door; and there was Brigid, or her ghost. "Am I in time?" gasped she, as she put the vessel of food in his hand. Aye," said Coll, seizing it. In his transport of delight he would have gone on his knees and kissed her feet; but before he could speak, she was gone. Whither should she go now? was Brigid's thought. No use returning to the desolate and lonesome home, where neither food nor fire was any longer to be found. She dreaded dying on her own hearthstone alone, and faint as she was she knew what was now before her. Gaining the path to the beach, she made a last pull on her energies to reach the whitewashed walls, above which her fading eyes just dimly discerned the cross. The only face she now wanted to look upon again was that thorn-crowned face which was waiting for her in the loneliness of the empty and wind-swept church. Falling, fainting, dragging herself on again, she crept within the shelter of the walls. A little more effort, and she would be at His feet. The struggle was made, blindly, slowly, desperately, with a last rally of all the passion of a most impassioned nature; and at last she lay her length on the earthen floor under the cross. Darkness, silence, peace, settled down upon her. The storm raved around, the night came on, and when the morning broke, Brigid was dead. Mildly and serenely that day had dawned, a pitiful sky looked down on the calamities of Inishmara, and the vessel with the relief-meal sailed into the harbour. For many even then alive, the food came all too late, but to numbers it brought assuagement and salvation. The charity of the world was at work, and though much had yet to be suffered, yet the hungry death had been mercifully stayed. Thanks to the timely help, Moya lived for better times, and when her health was somewhat restored, she emigrated with Coll to America. Every night in their distant backwoods hut they pray together for the soul of Brigid Laveile, who, when in this world, had loved one of them too well, and died to save the life of the other. VOL. XLII.-No. 493 26 SURSUM CORDA A JUBILEE ODE I WATCHED, to-day, the fountain's play 'Till, the appointed level reached, Thus Hope up springs on graceful wings From fervid hearts its yearning starts, In evr'y show'r there lives a pow'r As diamonds hidden in the mine, In heart that's pure it hides secure, When-cut and set-'twill sparkle yet, Then, patience! we shall soon be free Not made to last, earth's quickly past; Then lift your eyes above the skies, What's bought with pain, the heart to gain Z. SOME ULSTER PROVINCIALISMS By REV. DILLON COSGRAVE, O.C.C. WE hear much of Ulster nowadays. We are told of the WE sharp political and religious differences between the various sections of its population. Yet little is said of that homogeneity of speech which seems to be shared by Ulstermen of all creeds and politics, of that "Northern accent,' which, eked out by many words and phrases drawn straight from the Lowland Scotch dialect, serves to differentiate an Ulsterman, in the first sentence he speaks, from an inhabitant of the other three provinces of Ireland. There is, first, the accent or peculiar pronunciation of some vowels or consonants. Secondly, the Ulsterisms, really Scotticisms, words and phrases not found in standard English. In this slight sketch only a few of the more striking of both these kinds of peculiarities, as they have attracted the attention of one who is not by birth an Ulsterman, will be noted. The accent in general bears a close resemblance to that of Scotland. This is so far true that a Scotsman may easily be taken for an Ulsterman, or vice versa, if his place of origin be judged by his speech alone. Nor is this to be wondered at. The large Presbyterian population of the Northern province is of Scottish origin almost to a man. Many Episcopalians, and even some Catholics, are of the same extraction. Some of the Episcopalians of the Plantation of James I. were English, but their Scotch contemporaries seem, in the end, to have completely made their own of the English language as spoken in the province. Yet there is one Scottish pronunciation, the very distinct roll of the letter r, so much observed by Englishmen as a peculiarity of their Northern neighbours, which forms no part of the Northern Irish accent, but, on the contrary, is curiously reminiscent of a similar peculiarity in the accent of the Munster Irishman. To a Dubliner, all Ulstermen, whether judged by speech or character, are like Scotchmen. But the most intensely like are the Presbyterians, the descendants of the "wild Westland Whigs" of Sir Walter Scott's romances, who so stubbornly upheld the Scottish Covenant, who were the most violent Cameronians, and who listened in fact to the field-preachings of Richard Cameron, John Cargill, and others; who invaded England with Leslie, suffered under Cromwell, were persecuted by Claverhouse and Dalzell, and fought at Bothwell Brigg and Killiecrankie. It may be objected that these events were subsequent to James's Plantation of Ulster, but the connexion of Ulster with the Scottish Covenanters may be clearly perceived by a perusal of Sir Samuel Ferguson's fine Antrim ballads, "Una Phelimy " and "Willy Gilliland." The Ulster Scots are a well-known and valuable asset in the population of Ireland. In the United States the "Scotch Irish," as they have come to be called, are actually the most successful of all races. Their great eminence in American life was shown by the late Mark Hanna in his work entitled the Scotch Irish. The late distinguished Marquess of Dufferin, who was a descendant of James's Scottish planters, when requested to define his nationality, wittily replied in an answer worthy of so able a man and so great a diplomatist : " I am a Scotchman improved by three hundred years' residence in Ireland." Another Ulster Scot, the late Captain Mayne Reid, who was son of a Presbyterian minister in Lord Dufferin's County of Down, always insisted too that he was an Irishman. But it would be a mistake to suppose that all Ulster Scots, who are non-Catholics, are Lowlanders in origin. The formidable array of Scottish names with the prefix Mac which confronts the reader in the Belfast Directory, or any similar list for an Ulster non-Catholic locality, seems to show that there has been a large and continuous invasion of Ulster from the Western Highlands and the Hebrides. The late Lord Russell of Killowen humorously complained that some people considered Belfast "a respectable suburb of Glasgow," which also contains many Macs. There were a few Macs in Galloway, but their name was legion in the Highlands, and it is said that when a practical joker stood in the middle of a barrack square where a Highland regiment was quartered and shouted "Mac," a head appeared at every window. The Gaelic tongue has been retained much more fully in the Highlands than in Ulster. But a recent Scottish observer noticed in the most Irish-speaking of Ulster counties, Catholic and Nationalist Donegal, a strong resemblance in the people to those of the Gaelic-speaking Highland counties. Yet there must have been at least some superficial difference between the Gaelic of the Ulster counties, at any rate of Antrim, and that of the Highlanders if we are to accept the judgment of Sir Walter Scott. In his Legend of Montrose the arrival of the Antrim forces of the celebrated Colkitto is introduced. The Highlanders describe these Ulster Catholics as "speaking neither Saxon nor pure Gaelic." Colkitto's real name was Alaster M'Donnell, and it is curious to read of a man so identified with Ulster and Scotland in Thomas Davis's Life of Curran, both Davis and Curran being famous natives of the far south, County Cork. Davis speaks of Curran's listening, in his boyhood at Newmarket, to Alaster M'Donnell's March. Colkitto was killed at Knocknanoss, near Mallow, in 1647. In the English of the Ulsterman, as distinct from his Gaelic, several peculiar pronunciations may at once be noted. He seems, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Presbyterian, to metamorphose the usual English pronunciation of almost all his vowels. But his pronunciation of the long i is especially noticeable, and at once marks him off as an Ulsterman. In his consonants, perhaps, the best test of an Ulsterman are the sounds of t and th. T at the end of a syllable or of a word (as in water or hat) is most distinctly pronounced, and is never the slovenly compromise between s and t, when pronouncing the latter letter in such a position, so often heard all over the rest of Ireland outside Ulster. Th, whether hard as in through, or soft as in though, receives a distinctly different sound in the speech of an Ulsterman from its sound in that of any other Irishman. It must be acknowledged that the Ulster pronunciation of long i, of t, and of th approximates more closely to the correct English pronunciation of those letters and sounds than does their pronunciation by Irishmen of the other three provinces. As regards separate words and phrases used by Ulstermen, a good-sized book might be written on this subject. In parts of Antrim and Down, the most Scottish of the Ulster counties, the dialect is as Scotch as anything to be found in the works of Burns, Scott, or any other writer in that vernacular. This may be seen by reading the works of James Orr, the Antrim weaver-poet. Some of the place-names of these counties, and of the other Ulster counties as well, recall Scotland in quite a remarkable degree. For instance, the County Down localities of Crawfordsburn, Purdysburn, the too well-known Dolly's Brae, Kate M'Kay's Bridge, Cunningburn, Kirkcubbin, Montgomery's Lough, Tillysburn, Wallace's Hill, The Briggs (bridges), Craig |