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There was a race of gas balloons, each with a postcard attached to it begging the finder to say where it descended, and you could get a balloon for a shilling and have a chance of winning various impressive and embarrassing prizes if your balloon went far enough fish carvers, a silver-handled walking-stick, a bog-oak gramophone-record cabinet, and things like that.
It was of bog-oak, polished as a looking-glass, and on it were carved flowers and birds of all kinds, that gleamed and shone in the light of the fire. This couch was fit for a princess, and a princess Finola was, though she did not know it herself.
Then there was a basket beautifully carved out of an apricot-stone, and a narrow silver chain broken in many parts; and there was a bog-oak brooch and an old jet bracelet. Annie also possessed a gold locket and chain which she had won as a prize on a certain memorable occasion, but this treasure she had also stupidly left behind her. How provoking!
Every man was to be a kind of king in his own country, evictions were to be utterly unknown; the peasantry were to live rent free, under a visionary scheme of which he had all the absurd particulars; the old sporting maxim reminding farmers that landlord shooting begins on January 1st and ends on December 31st was to become obsolete by reason of a complete extinction of the species only an odd one being occasionally dug out of the bogs along with trunks of bog-oak and skeletons of the great Irish elk; while the family pig, which, having for ages occupied a responsible position in the matter of "Rint," is understood to be an inveterate landlord-hater, will be released from his delicate situation, will be relieved from his harassing anxieties, will no longer be sacrificed to the exigencies of the occasion; but, on the contrary, will peacefully expire of old age, surrounded by every tribute of respect.
Love, of Kildare, a landed proprietor, now in Dublin, says that on Sunday last Dr. Gowing, parish priest of Kill, denounced Home Rule from the altar, and advised the people to have none of it. The Dubliners are beginning to publicly ridicule their Nationalist members. A bog-oak carving represents a typical Irishman driving a "conthrairy pig," which is supposed to stand for Tim Harrington.
She displayed ornaments that were not precisely jewels, the value of which was of genealogical order; thus, she wore her grandfather's fobs and seals, her mother's bracelets of bog-oak and lava, and her brooch contained the hair of her only child, long deceased.
Two bright gleaming balls shone in the dark background of the forest, like two lustrous Irish diamonds in a black field of bog-oak. He knew at once that they were the eyes of a deer, which, with a curiosity well-known as peculiar to many wild animals, had approached the fire to stare at it.
None of these things affected me so much as a pile of lumber on the floor, not firewood but unmistakable wreck-wood, black as bog-oak, still caked in places with the mud of ages. Nor was it the mere sight of this lumber that dumbfounded me.
With their heads to the wall of the hut and their feet towards the fire were two sleeping-couches one of plain woodwork, in which slept the old woman; the other was Finola's. It was of bog-oak, polished as a looking-glass, and on it were carved flowers and birds of all kinds, that gleamed and shone in the light of the fire.
This was many hundred years ago, and there were very few people living then in Ireland, and by degrees, when the trees got very old, they began to fall down into the rivers and stopped them up, so that the water could not flow on, and the rivers overflowed all the nice forests, and the trees all fell, so that when some hundred years passed they were all down, and the branches rotted, and the grass and clay became wet, like sponge, and the whole of the nice shady forests of great trees became what we call bogs, and the remains of those pretty branches and leaves, where the birds used to sing so sweetly, has become turf, like this piece which we have for a lesson; and when men are cutting this turf out, they often find the great trunks of those trees, that many hundred years ago were so green and beautiful, quite black and ugly, but still so hard that they can scarcely be cut, and these old trees are called bog-oak, and the cabinet-maker buys them and makes them into beautiful chairs, and tables, and presses, and many other things, and they are quite black, and when polished you little children might see your faces in them.
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