Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

blossom came first, then the apple, then the lilac, then the chestnut and laburnum, the oak last. He indicated the kitten caterpillar, the thrush snail, the speckled wood butterfly, which were abundant because the garden bordered on the woods, approached by the Long Walk.
    A year after she arrived in Ireland the Irish clown Johnny Patterson, with whom she frequently appeared on the London stage, was killed during a riot at a circus in Castleisland, County Kerry.
    Four years after she came to Ireland her friend, the Belle Daisy Hughes, after a performance at the Brighton Empire, threw herself from the balcony of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, to her death.
    The Belle gave two performances in Ireland.
    One at the Gaiety Theatre where, shortly after its opening in 1871, Emily Soldene rode a horse on stage in Renaissance pageboy leggings.
    In a beefeater-red chiffon dress, trimmed with petals, against a drop scene of Sleepy Hollow in Wicklow, she sang ‘When the Happy Time Shall Come’ from H.J. Byron’s The Bohemian Girl , ‘The Belle of High Society,’ ‘Molly the Marchioness,’ ‘O, I Love Society,’ ‘Tommy Atkins,’ ‘The Butler Kissed the Housemaid,’ ‘The Footman Kissed the Cook,’ ‘It was a Year Ago,’ ‘Love,’ ‘In the Balmy Summer Time.’
    She shared the bill with an underwater acrobatic couple in broadly striped bathing costumes who displayed in a tank, and Nat Emmett’s performing goats.
    The other was at the Leinster Hall in Hawkins Street where, shortly after it opened as the New Theatre Royal in 1821, a bottle was thrown at the Lord Lieutenant. In the old Theatre Royal in Smock Alley guns were used to clear the audience off the stage.
    In a tartan dress and glengarry—a Scottish hat—against a drop scene of Galway docks with swans, she sang ‘The Titsy Bitsy Girl,’ ‘Tip I Addy Ay,’ ‘Louisiana Lou,’ ‘Her Golden Hair,’ ‘I saw Esau Kissing Kate,’ ‘Our Lodger’s Such a Nice Young Man,’ ‘Maisie is a Daisy,’ and the oldest vaudeville song, ‘Lillibulero,’ sung by the victors after the Battle of the Boyne, sung in Dublin as part of an all-child cast production of The Beggar’s Opera in 1729.
    On the bill with her were dogs ridden by monkeys in jockey caps and Miss Hunt’s possum-faced Ladies’ Orchestra, all in bicorne hats and Hussar uniforms, who played Thomas Moore’s ‘Melodies’ to a weeping audience.
    Captain O’Shea, Kitty O’Shea’s husband, whose mother was a papal countess, had been Member of Parliament for Bracebridge’s area, Parnell having endorsed him with a speech in Galway in 1886, and the Bishop of Galway alleged it was a prostituted constituency, in return for Captain O’Shea’s connivance in the Parnell-Kitty O’Shea liaison.
    When Captain O’Shea finally decided to sue for divorce at the end of 1889, the year the Belle came to Ireland, by all accounts the London music-hall stage had a feast, and the hilarity was compounded by a maid’s declaration at the divorce trial that Parnell had once escaped out the window by means of a rope fire escape.
    Parnell was represented with a Quaker collar, frock coat, Shetland clown’s trousers, hobnail boots. Comediennes wore whalebone corsetting to emphasize Kitty O’Shea’s rotundities. Captain O’Shea was usually endowed with an enlarged curlicue moustachio like a Dion Boucicault sheriff.
    ‘Notty Charlie Parnell!’ Drop scene painters had a Hibernian spree. One Parnell production featured a Barbary ape in a bowler hat, sealskin waistcoat, trousers embroidered with salad-green shamrocks.
    At the end of the 1890s the Belle heard how comedians came on stage in London dressed in prison uniform and their comedienne partners addressed them as ‘Oscar’ with a flip of the hand.
    Lord Alfred Douglas wore a school straw or a domed, wide-brimmed child’s hat, Eton jacket with white carnation, drawers, calf stockings, his cheeks the red of a carousel horse’s cheeks.
    The Prince of Wales, shortly to be Edward VII, an aficionado of the music halls, was said to have turned his back in his box when Lord Alfred Douglas was presented in black-and-pink striped drawers.
    But shocked ladies actually left the theatre when he appeared in Jaeger pyjamas with frogged breast buttons.
    In 1900 the Belle was one of the ladies who helped serve bonbonnières to fifteen thousand children in the Phoenix Park on the occasion of the visit by Queen Victoria, a return visit to the city where in 1849 she