The Foolish Lovers

ST. JOHN G. ERVINE
New York 1920
TO MY MOTHER who asked me to write a story without any Bad words in it; and TO MRS. J. O. HANNAY who asked me to write a story without any Sex in it.
Why, 'tis an office of discovery, love! The Merchant of Venice.
Love unpaid does soon disband. ANDREW MARVELL
If you were to say to an Ulster man, Who are the proudest people in Ireland? he would first of all stare at you as if he had difficulty in believing that any intelligent person could ask a question with so obvious an answer, and then he would reply, Why, the Ulster people, of course! And if you were to say to a Ballyards man, Who are the proudest people in Ulster? he would reply ... if he deigned to reply at all ... A child would know that! The Ballyards people, of course!
It is difficult for anyone who is not a native of the town, to understand why the inhabitants of Ballyards should possess so great a pride in their birthplace. It is not a large town ... it is not even the largest town in the county ... nor has it any notable features to distinguish it from a dozen other towns of similar size in that part of Ireland. Millreagh, although it is now a poor, scattered sort of place, was once of great importance: for the mail-boats sailed from its harbour to Port Michael until the steamship owners agreed that Port Michael was too much exposed to the severities of rough weather, and chose another harbour elsewhere. Millreagh mourns over its lost glory, attributable in no way to the fault of Millreagh, but entirely to the inscrutable design of Providence which arranged that Port Michael, and not Kirkmull, should lie on the opposite side of the Irish Sea; and every Sunday morning, after church, and sometimes on Sunday afternoon, the people walk along the breakwater to the lighthouse and remind each other of the days when their town was of consequence. We spent a hundred and fifty thousand pounds on our harbour, they say to each other, and then the Scotch went and did the like of that! —the like of that being their stupidity in living in an exposed situation. Millreagh does not admit that it has suffered any more than a temporary diminishment of its greatness, and it makes optimistic and boastful prophecies of the fortune and repute that will come to it when the engineers make a tunnel between Scotland and Ireland. Sometimes an article on the Channel Tunnel will appear in the Newsletter or the Whig , and for weeks afterwards Millreagh lives in a fever of expectancy; for whatever else may be said about the Tunnel, this is certain to be said of it, that it will start, in Ireland, from Millreagh. On that brilliant hope, Millreagh, tightening its belt, lives in a fair degree of happiness, eking out its present poverty by fishing and by letting lodgings in the summer.