But that transaction was never closed. We found the house—grimy, dark, dirt-floored, trash-littered—with the man's wife and assorted children within; but the woman told us that "himself" had driven out into the country and would not be back till evening. And just then it began to drizzle most dismally.
"This is no day for the trip, anyway," I said. "Suppose we wait till we get to Belfast, and run down from there."
So it was agreed, and we made our way back to the station, through a sea of sticky mud, and presently took train again for Ireland's ancient capital.
We were ready to leave Dublin for a swing clear around the coast of Ireland, and late that afternoon, having sifted our luggage to the minimum and armed ourselves cap-à-pie against every vicissitude of weather, we bade our friends at the hotel good-bye (not forgetting the bell-boy), drove to the station, and got aboard a train, which presently rolled away southwards. It was very full—the third-class crowded with soldiers in khaki bound for the camp on the Curragh of Kildare, and our own compartment jammed with a variety of people.
In one corner, a white-haired priest mumbled his breviary and watched the crowd with absent eyes, while across from him a loud-voiced woman, evidently, from her big hat and cheap finery, just home from America, was trying to overawe the friends who had gone to Dublin to meet her by an exhibition of sham gentility. In the seat with us was a plump and comfortable woman of middle age, with whom we soon got into talk about everything from children to Home Rule.
What she had to say about Home Rule was interesting. Her home was somewhere down in the Vale of Tipperary, and I judged from her appearance that she was the wife of a well-to-do farmer. She was most emphatically not a Nationalist.
"It isn't them who own land, or who are buyin' a little farm under the purchase act that want Home Rule," she said. "No, no; them ones would be glad to let well enough alone. 'Tis the labourers, the farm-hands, the ditch-diggers, and such-like people, who have nothin' to lose, that shout the loudest for it. They would like a bit of land themselves, and they fancy that under Home Rule they'll be gettin' it; but where is it to come from, I'd like to know, unless off of them that has it now; and who would be trustin' the likes of them to pay for it? Ah, 'tis foolish to think of! Besides, if everybody owned land, where would we be gettin' labour to work it? No, no; 'tis time to stop, I say, and there be many who think like me."
"What wages does a labourer make?" I asked.
"From ten to twelve shillin's a week."