"You'll have to answer my question first."
"'Twill be only five shillings an hour, sir."
I passed on to the next driver, who had been listening to this colloquy with absorbed interest. His price was four shillings. So I passed on to the third. His price was three shillings. I suppose if I had passed once again, the price would have been two shillings; but three shillings was within my limit, so we mounted into our places and were off.
I fear, however, that that phrase, "we were off," gives a wrong idea of our exit. We did not whirl up the street, with our horse curvetting proudly and the jarvey clinging to the reins. No, nothing like that. The horse trotted—I convinced myself of this, from time to time, by looking at him—but he was one of those up-and-down trotters, that come down in almost exactly the same place from which they go up. The jarvey encouraged him from time to time by touching him gently with the whip, but the horse never varied his gait, except that, whenever he came to a grade, he walked. Sometimes we would catch up with a pedestrian sauntering in the same direction, and then it was quite exciting to see how we worked our way past him, inch by inch. This mode of progression had one advantage: it was not necessary to stop anywhere to examine architectural details or absorb local atmosphere. We had plenty of time to do that as we passed. In fact, in some of the slum streets, we absorbed rather more of the atmosphere than we cared for.
Cork is an ancient place, built for the most part on an island in the River Lee. St. Fin Barre started it in the seventh century by founding a monastery on the island; the Danes sailed up the river, some centuries later, and captured it; and then the Anglo-Normans took it from the Danes and managed to keep it by ceaseless vigilance. The Irish peril was so imminent, that the English had to bar the gates not only at night, but whenever they went to church or to their meals, and no stranger was suffered inside the walls until he had checked his sword and dagger and other lethal weapons with the gate-keeper.
But the Irish have always had a way with them; and what they couldn't accomplish by force of arms, they did by blarney;—or maybe it was the girls who did it! At any rate, at the end of a few generations Cork was about the Irishest town in Ireland, and levied its own taxes and made its own laws and even set up its own mint, and when the English Parliament attempted to interfere, invited it to mind its own business. The climax came when that picturesque impostor, Perkin Warbeck, landed in the town, was hailed as a son of the Duke of Clarence and the rightful King of England by the mayor, and provided with new clothes and a purse of gold by the citizens, together with a force for the invasion of England. The result of which was that the mayor lost his head and the city its charter.
Cork is a tragic word in Irish ears not because of this ancient history, but because of the dreadful scenes enacted here in the wake of the great famine of 1847. It was here that thousands and thousands of famished, hopeless, half-crazed men and women said good-bye to Ireland forever and embarked for the New World. Hundreds more, unable to win farther, lay down in the streets and died, and every road leading into the town was hedged with unburied bodies. That ghastly torrent of emigration has kept up ever since, though it reached its flood some twenty years ago, and is by no means so ghastly as it was. Yet every train that comes into the town bears its quota of rough-clad people, mere boys and girls most of them, with wet eyes and set faces, and behind it, all through the west and south, it leaves a wake of sobs and wails and bitter weeping.
Cork possesses nothing of antiquarian interest. The old churches have all been swept away. The oldest one still standing dates only from 1722, and is worth a visit not because of itself, but because of some verses written about its bells by a poet who lies buried in its churchyard. St. Anne Shandon, with its tall, parti-coloured tower surmounted by its fish-weathervane, stands on a hill to the north of the Lee. The tower contains a peal of eight bells, and it was their music which furnished inspiration for Father Prout's pleasant lines:
With deep affection and recollection
I often think of the Shandon bells,
Whose sounds so wild would, in the days of childhood,
Fling round my cradle their magic spells.
On this I ponder where'er I wander,
And thus grow fonder, sweet Cork, of thee,—
With thy bells of Shandon, that sound so grand on
The pleasant waters of the River Lee.
Of course we wanted to see St. Anne Shandon and to hear the bells, so, with some difficulty, we persuaded our driver to put his horse at the ascent. The streets rising up that hill are all slums, with little lanes more slummy still ambling away in various directions; and all of them were full of people, that afternoon, who hailed our advent as an unexpected addition to the pleasures and excitements of the day, and followed along, inspecting us curiously, and commenting frankly upon the details of our attire. The impression we made was, I think, on the whole, favourable, but there is a certain novelty in hearing yourself discussed as impersonally as if you were a statue, and after the first embarrassment, we rather enjoyed it. At last we reached the church, and stopped there in the shadow of the tower until the chimes rang. They are very sweet and melodious, and fully deserve Father Prout's rhapsody.