I saw but one variety, however, the flower of which has a dark blue trumpet and scarlet bell, but this is perhaps the most showy of all, and nothing could be more gorgeous than a hedge in full bloom. In the woods, or in gardens where they are left untrimmed, the bushes will grow into veritable trees, twenty-five or thirty feet high.
We went back to the hotel, when Betty had gathered all she could carry, and she sent the flowers up to our room by a maid who laughed sympathetically—I fancy she had seen such attacks of madness more than once before—and then we started along a winding path which led through the woods down to the shore of the bay. And we soon found that fuchsias were not the only things which grow to giant proportions here, for the path was hedged with ferns four or five feet high—great, lordly fellows, standing stiffly upright as though on parade. Ferns were everywhere, even on the trees overhead, for the trees are padded with moss, and in this the ferns have found a foothold. And there were holly trees still scarlet with last year's berries, and hawthorn fragrant with bloom; and over everything the English ivy ran riot—rather in the same fashion, I thought as I looked at it, in which England herself has run riot over Ireland.
We got down to the shore of the bay, at last, and I quite agree with Thackeray that it is a world's wonder, with its rock-strewn shore and emerald islands and pellucid water, framed in, all about, by rugged mountains. We wandered along its edge, gay with sea-pinks, for an hour or more, and then spent another hour loitering in the woods, and finally walked on, between the flaming hedges and fern-draped trees, to the little village, which we could smell, long before we came to it, by the tang of peat-smoke in the air. It is a mere huddle of low, thatched houses, and I judge that, even amid these gorgeous surroundings, life can be as hard and sordid as anywhere in Ireland.
A little distance from the village was a pretty, two-storied villa, covered with roses and climbing vines, and with a large garden beside it, blazing with a great variety of gorgeous bloom. We stopped to look at it over the gate, and the gardener espied us and came hurrying forward to ask us in to see the flowers. And one of the plants he showed us most proudly was a single, sickly-looking stalk of Indian corn, about a foot high, growing in a pot. When we told him that, in the state we came from, Indian corn filled thousands and thousands of acres every summer, and grew from eight to ten feet high, he looked as though he scarcely believed us. But that little stalk of corn brought home to me, as perhaps nothing else could have done, the fact that my own particular corner of the earth is divinely favoured, too, in ways unknown even to Glengarriff.
I had a most improving conversation, that night, in the smoking-room of the hotel, with a Catholic priest and a salesman for the British Petroleum Company. The priest, who must have been at least sixty-five, had the typical long, thin Irish face, and was intensely Nationalist. The salesman was younger and rather rubicund, and I judge that he was an Englishman and a Unionist. It was the priest who did most of the talking about Home Rule, after I got him started, and he protested earnestly that Ulster's fears of unfair treatment were utterly unfounded. The Catholics, he said, didn't want supremacy; all they wanted was equality, but they did want that, and felt they were entitled to it. England, he admitted, had made great strides within the past ten years toward atoning for her old injustice to Ireland, and was evidently trying hard to do what was right.
"Yes," broke in the salesman; "she's going altogether too far. What with old age pensions and the purchase act and poor relief and railway building and putting up labourers' houses and what not, she's spending twice as much on this country as she gets out of it. It won't do; it has got to stop."
"I don't believe England spends more on Ireland than she gets out of us," said the priest quickly.
"Here it is in black and white," and the other triumphantly slapped the paper he had been reading. "Imperial expenditures for Ireland, 1912-13, £12,381,500; received from Ireland, £10,850,000; deficit, £1,531,500—that would be about seven and a half million dollars," he added, for my benefit. "Over a million and a half pounds sterling that England has made Ireland a present of in the past year! What do you think of that?" and he turned back to the priest.
"The figures may be true," said the latter, slowly, "and then again they may not. I have been told that England burdens Ireland with many expenditures which don't belong to us. But in any event, I agree with you that charity does us no good—it does us harm. We don't want charity."