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The CHRISTMAS Lady of the House
CONDUCTED BY
GRAWFORD HARTNELL
INNISMEELA.
I can only see the moonbeams that on Innismeela float,
But if I slept inside the Fairy Ring
I'd see them sailing, sailing, in their little silver boat,
And hear the songs the Fairy people sing.
For the Fairy man has told me how he slumbered there one day,
And woke to find them dancing on the shore,
And still he hears them singing, tho' 'tis faint and far away,
And he wishes he was with them ever more.
"Come away! come away!"
He can hear them say,
"Come to a far off shore.
If you stay—if you stay
For a year and a day,
You will stay with us ever more."
I've seen the Queen of Fairyland, I've heard that wondrous song,
With her to heights of happiness I've flown.
But now the days are weary and the nights are long—so long,
My Fairy Queen has left me all alone.
Innismeela—Innismeela, there's a sleep that knows no dream,
And in that dreamless slumber I would be,
For I know that I shall waken by some still celestial stream,
And through the golden light she'll come to me!
"Come away! come away!"
I can hear her say.
"Why will the wanderer roam?
It is long—so long
Since I heard that song
That is calling the wand'rer Home."
PERCY FRENCH.
Twenty-Ninth Year.
5
Christmas Lady of the House.
The Great Fires of Dublin.
By W. J. LAWRENCE.
Author of "The Elizabethan Playhouse and Other Studies."
"Lady of the House" Copyright.
WITHIN living memory, and a trifle beyond it, Dublin has had some thrilling experiences of the ravages of what that deft handler of facile phrases, the picturesque reporter, was once wont to call "the devouring
Dublin's Royal Arcade.
By a curious association of ideas, I am reminded at this juncture of the story of the curate who, on being asked to give a selection from Keats at some Penny Readings, wired in reply, "What are Keats?" Doubtless, a similar perplexity
Office, and ran back some two hundred feet into Suffolk Street. It was due to the enterprise of George Home, a thrifty and far-seeing Scotch confectioner, who had landed in Dublin a year or so earlier and opened a shop at No. 23 Lover Sackville Street. In divers ways a re-
DESTRUCTION OF THE OLD THEATRE ROYAL, DUBLIN, BY FIRE 90th FEBRUARY, 1880.
element." Although it cannot be said that any of these events emulated the Great Fire of London in being blessings in disguise, a triad single themselves out as affording landmarks in our history. These were the burning of the Royal Arcade in 1897, of the old Theatre Royal in 1880, and the wholesale destruction of Sackville Street and its environs in the Rebellion of 1916.
exists in the minds of most of my readers regarding that once popular but now forgotten rendezvous, the Royal Arcade. So, before proceeding to narrate how it was burnt down, it behooves me to say something about its history.
The Royal Arcade and Grand Promenade—to give it its original style and title—was erected on College Green in 1819 on the site of the old General Post
markable man, Home was his own architect in the venture, and spent some $16,000 upon it. An interesting glimpse of the characteristics of the Grand Promenade is afforded us in two small engravings published in 1821 in a scarce little book called "McGregor's New Picture of Dublin." From these and other sources one learns that the Royal Arcade was arranged in two sections, an upper