Ben Bolt
down, and as the years passed, new favorites crowded “Ben Bolt” off the programs and out of public recollection. So English picked up heart of hope and labored away at his plays and his poetry in the fond belief that he had at last managed to outlive that miserable song. Fifty years had passed since it appeared in the New York Mirror; surely it was buried beyond any possibility of resurrection, and his last years would be unshadowed by it.
But Fate held in reserve a truly terrific stroke.
In 1894, Harper’s Magazine began the publication of a story of Paris student life entitled Trilby, by George du Maurier, the great cartoonist of Punch. (These details are here set down because nobody reads Trilby nowadays, more’s the pity!) Its heroine, Trilby O’Ferrall—a light-hearted daughter of the Quarter, with all the virtues but one, who drifted in and out of the studios on the left bank posing for everything from a hand to the “altogether,” but chiefly remarkable for her feet which were masterpieces—happened to be the daughter of a convivial Irishman, Patrick Michael O’Ferrall, one-time fellow of Trinity, Cambridge. He, too, had all the virtues but one: he was a drunkard. So, after disgracing himself at home, he had drifted to Paris, married a bar-maid and found congenial haven behind her bar, where, in
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