6 OCTOBER 1883, Page 2

The Parnellite invasion of Ulster came to a speedy and

happily bloodless end, and the rumour that Mr. Parnell himself had been murdered by an Ulster Orangeman proved to be- only an imaginative prevision of what might possibly have. happened, if Mr. Parnell had tempted fate by attempting to stump the actual "Black North." As a matter of fact, he was more wisely advised, and had remained on this side of the Channel; while Mr. T. P. O'Connor, with two or three lesser Leaguers, made a rapid raid into and still more rapid retreat from Tyrone. Mr. O'Connor seems to have had a narrow escape from the Ulster equivalent for tar and feathers at Porta- down, the locality of the famous Orange ballad of '48 beginning,—

" I am a loyal Orangeman,

From Portadown, ayont the Bann,"

and in which the indiscriminating truculence of the Orange mind is finely displayed by the couplet,—

" The first of them, rn shoot, by Cog,

Is Redington, that Popish dog,"

Sir T. Redington being Lord Clarendon's Under-Secretary at the time.