Something for St Patrick's Day (as well as the tasty Viennese [sic] biscuits that Jerry has kindly brought in):

 
It's the fancy Edward F. Mullen cover of Miles O'Reilly: His Book (New York: Carleton, 1864), composed by Charles Graham Halpin (styled Halpine after his move to New York), a journalist born in Co. Meath in 1829 to Anglican parents.  He studied medicine and law at Trinity College Dublin and emigrated to Boston 1851, whereupon he became an assistant editor of the Boston Post.  He moved to New York, where he worked for the Times and Herald, covering Walker's Nicaraguan Filibuster War of 1855-6. 

In 1861, he responded to Lincoln's call to arms, and enlisted in the New York Sixty-ninth Regiment of Irish volunteers, serving in Missouri and at Hilton Head.  In 1863, a series of anti-draft riots led to the first of his stories and poems of the exploits of Miles O'Reilly in the New York Herald as an attempt to drum up support for the military among the New York Irish. Fiercely egalitarian, O'Reilly rarely refuses the opportunity to tell his superiors how to win the war; the tales were a great success, and were widely reprinted.  And, as the American National Biography puts it: 'he helped change the image of the Irish in the North and gave the Irish themselves a sense that they had a future in the United States, that the country was worth fighting for'. 

Overwork and insomnia led to overdose of chloroform in 1868, not far from the Herald offices.  For a photo of him, visit the Pageant of America in the NYPL Digital Library.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

[M.J.S.]