HOLLAND is noted the world over for its neatness. The Dutch housewives spend a good part of each morning in scrubbing the sidewalks in front of their houses. Philadelphia is also a clean town and there you will see house-maids out scrubbing the front stoops and the brick pavements. Now a good part of the inhabitants of Donegal emigrate to Philadelphia. (We in America all know the song, "For I'm Off to Philadelphia in the Morning.") Well, the third neatest place that occurs to me is Rathmullan, in Lough Swilly, in County Donegal.
Whether Philadelphia is neat because of the Irish or the Irish of Donegal go to Philadelphia because it is neat, I leave to others to determine.
All my life I've read and have been told that the north of Ireland was very different from the south; that the people were better off and more thrifty, but I did not expect to see such scrupulous neatness. The houses are mostly white and severely plain in line, built of stone faced with plaster, sometimes smooth and sometimes rough finished, but always in apple-pie order (unless they were on parade the three days I was there). Even the alleys are sweet and clean, and where the people keep their pigs is a mystery to me. I snapped one, but he was being driven hither and thither after the manner of Irish pigs, and may not have lived in Rathmullan at all.
Here in the town of Donegal while the houses are not of Philadelphia neatness, they show evidence of housewifely care, and if there is abject poverty it is carefully concealed. (I have been a week in Ireland and I have not seen a beggar or a drunken man, although I have kept my eyes moving rapidly.)
In Donegal
How often must an emigrant who has elected to live in noisome tenements in American cities long for the white cottages and the green lanes and noble mountains and verdant valleys of Donegal!
Every hotel at which I have stopped so far has had hot and cold water baths and I have only been to small towns.