Funny little donkeys with heads quite buried in burlap bags the while they sought for oats, gay-petticoated and pretty-faced women in groups, grizzled farmers that looked the part, waterbutts on wheels in Rembrandtesque passageways, leading to sunlit courtyards beyond—regular prize winners if one had any sort of luck.
And then a man with an ingratiating brogue asked me to take him and his cart and almost before I knew it I had taken a sow that weighed all of five hundred pounds, and my snapshooting was over for the day.
You may be sure that next day I went well prepared, but Fair Day is only once a month, and fair days are not much more plentiful, and it rained all day, and the only thing I saw worth taking was a sort of Don Quixote windmill that had been run by a horse probably years before the expression "the curse o' Crummel" (Cromwell) came to be used, and I was in a swiftly moving train and there was a woman in the way—oh! there's no doubt that camerading is fascinating, but it is also vexatious.
Still, my advice to those about to travel is—take a camera. If it's a very rainy Sunday you may want them to leave on an early train.
Tipping is a subject that is always worth discussing. A man does not like to give less than the usual tip, and he ought not to give more, because it makes it hard for the next man, who may not be able to afford much of an expenditure.
Tipping in Ireland is a very mild thing compared to continental tipping. I'll never forget my first experience in Amsterdam. I have spent many agreeable and useful years since then, and the world has been better for my presence, for eighty-four months at least, since that day, but the comic opera features of that first wholesale tipping stand out as if I heard the whole thing last night at some Broadway theater.
There were two of us, and we had spent two delightful days in Amsterdam, doing the picture galleries and confirming Baedeker as hard as we could, and now we must give up the two huge rooms on the first floor that we occupied at the Grand Hotel (to give it a name) and make our way to other Dutch hostelries.
I said to Massenger, "How about tipping? Does it obtain in Holland?"