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Show M. HICKEY HARDEN. M. Hickey Harden, Baron of St. Patrick, says a correspondent of the N.Y. Tribune, came into the world in California, and there passed his early youth. The fame of some aristocratic marriages accomplished in Europe by California young ladies had a powerful effect on the imagination of his parents and of the future nobleman. They set them thinking about an illustrious Irish pedigree, and about legendary estates confiscated in the Rebellion of 1798. With California gold young Hickey Harden or Harden Hickey, for his name is given both ways, was handsomely started in life over here. He was placed in a French school, and then sent to St. Cyr. His object in going there was eventually to qualify for a command in a National Irish army, and to win back the mythological estates in which he has brought himself to believe. I know Ireland very well, and the part of it from which the Baron of St. Patrick tells his French friends that his family was expelled. My memory is stored with legions about the old families of the county Wexford, who were compromised in the different insurrections against the English authority. But I cannot remember ever having heard in my life of anybody in that part of Ireland of the name of Hickey who possessed a freehold estate toward the end of last century or earlier. There were Hickeys who were curriers and dealers in whisky in small she been houses, and the aristocrat of the family was an auctioneer. Harden is a good name on the borders of Scotland. But before the Encumbered Estates act was passed, as much could not be said of it in Ireland. It was essentially a working-class name, like McLaughlin, McHugh, or Meehan. So far back, it appears, as the time of James II, a certain Patrick Hickey came to France, and through the proscribed English King at St. Germains, obtained a commission in the Irish regiment, which was incorporated with the army of Louis XIV. Like Marshal McMahon's grandfather, Dr. Patrick, this Hickey was a tall, handsome, dashing fellow, and walked into the affections of a rich and titled lady, free to dispose of her hand and of her fortune. She married him, and they left descendants, now represented by some ladies of good family and Legitimist and ultra-Catholic principles. The Baron of St. Patrick naturally found in the emigration of a Hickey to France in the seventeenth century confirmation of the legendary pedigree which nobody looked into nor questioned. A good-looking ??? fellow with ??? year, who understands how to put the best leg foremost and can deal in tall talk without making himself ridiculous, might claim here, without provoking contradiction, to be descended from Romulus and Remus, or, for that matter, from the she-wolf that nursed them. Baron Hickey Harden is now about six-and-twenty. He is fair-haired, tall, wears fashionably-made clothes, does not strike one as being a fop, has a good seat on horseback, and is an excellent judge of horse-flesh. He married a Signora Sampierra three years ago. She claims on her side to be of still more ancient descent than her husband, having had for her ancestor in the direct line no less a personage than the Apostle Peter! According to the Sampierra mythology, the Prince of the Apostles was a widower when he came to Rome. A patrician lady fell in love with him, and the saint was not by any means indifferent to her charms. To convert her and to obtain her protection at the Court of Nero for his fellow-Christians he married her, and the day on which he was crucified, with his head downward, she gave birth to a son. Hence the name of Sampierra which the families bear who are descended in the male line from this Roman Tristan. |