It had been on a Saturday evening that we first saw Dublin, and it was on a Saturday evening that we reached Belfast; and we had thought the streets of Dublin crowded, but compared with those of Belfast, they were nowhere. Even in our first ride up from the station, along York Street and Royal Avenue, it was evident that here was a town where life was strenuous and eager; there was no mistaking its air of alert prosperity; and when, after dinner, we sallied forth on foot to see more of it, we found the sidewalks so crowded that it was possible to move along them only as the crowd moved.
It was a better-dressed crowd than the Dublin one, but I fancied its cheeks were paler and its bodies less robust. Indeed, I am inclined to think the average stature in Belfast an inch or so under the average elsewhere. Great numbers of the men and women we saw on the streets that night were obviously undersized. I am by no means tall; five feet eight inches is, here in America, about the average; but when I walked among that Belfast crowd, I overtopped it by half a head. It was this strange sensation—the sensation of being a tall man, which I had never before experienced—which first drew my attention to the stature of the crowd.
There must be several regiments of British troops stationed at Belfast, for soldiers were much in evidence that evening, and in a great diversity of uniform. They, too, for the most part, seemed undersized, in spite of their erect carriage; and they were, as is the way with soldiers everywhere, much interested in the girls; and the girls, after the fashion of girls everywhere, were much interested in the soldiers—and there was a great deal of flirting and coquetting and glancing over shoulders and stopping to talk, and walking about with clasped hands.
Next to the crowd, the most interesting feature of Belfast is the shops, which are very bright and attractive. The Scotch have a genius for fancy breads and cakes, and the bakers' shops here were extremely alluring. There seemed to be also an epidemic of auction sales and closing out sales and cut price sales, announced by great placards pasted all over the windows; but there were so many of them that I fancy most of them were fakes.
One notices also in Belfast the multiplicity of bands. It seemed to me that night that a band, playing doggedly away, was passing all the time. Sometimes the band would be followed by a body of marching men, sometimes by men and women together, sometimes it would be just playing itself along without any one behind it. Nobody in the crowd paid much attention, not even when a big company of boy scouts marched past, looking very clever in their broad hats with the little chin-straps, and grey flannel shirts and flapping short trousers showing their bare knees.
What I am setting down here are merely my first impressions of Belfast. I do not allege that they were correct impressions, or that they fairly describe the town, but, as we were fresh from many weeks in the south and west of Ireland, the sense of contrast we experienced that first evening is not without significance.
We went back to the hotel, finally, for we had had a strenuous day; but for long and long we could hear the bands passing in the street below; and then the martial rattle of drums and scream of fifes brought us to the window, and we saw a great crowd of children march past, with banners waving and tin buckets and shovels rattling. It was a Sunday School picnic, just back from a day at the seashore; and the air which the fifes and drums were playing with a vigour that made the windows rattle was "Work, for the Night is Coming!" I had never before realised what a splendid marching tune it is!
I am sorry we did not go to church, next morning, for the pulpits of Belfast were thundering against Home Rule, as we saw by the Monday papers. Instead, we walked down to the river, for a look at the harbour and custom house, and then about the streets to the city hall, with its dome and corner towers oddly reminiscent of St. Paul's Cathedral; and then we took a tram to the Botanical Gardens. The tram ran along a tree-embowered street, lined on either side with villas set in the midst of grounds so beautiful that any of them might have been the gardens; but when we reached the end of the line, we found we had come too far. The conductor was greatly chagrined that he had forgot to tell us where to get off, and sternly refused to accept any fare for the return trip.
The gardens, which we finally reached, are very attractively laid out, but far more interesting than the flowers and the shrubs was the crowd which was coming home from church. There seems to be a church on every square in Belfast, and I judge they were all full that day—as they no doubt are every Sunday, for church-going is still fashionable in the British Isles; and the crowd which poured along the walks of the gardens was as well-dressed and handsome as could be seen anywhere. It was a crowd made up of people evidently and consciously well-to-do, and one distinctive characteristic was a certain severity of aspect, a certain prevalence of that black-coated, side-whiskered, stern-lipped type which was much more common in America thirty years ago than it is now. Our type has changed—has softened and grown more urbane; but I should judge that the cold steel of Calvinism is as sharp and merciless as ever in Belfast.