I wish I might write that I saw evidences of destitution on every side—it would please the sentimentalists—but I did not. There were beggars, but not so many as I had feared I would see, and they did not chase me any harder than youngsters have chased me in City Hall Park in New York demanding a cent to buy sterilized milk.
In Sligo I was followed by a poor woman carrying a baby, and as she raised her hand for alms her shawl dropped off and disclosed her nakedness to the waist, but I was assured by a Sligo gentleman that she was a professional beggar from out of town, and that possibly the baby was not hers, and I know for a fact that she went to a public house with the money I gave her.
And all the time I was fumbling in my pocket for coppers she was wishing me happy days. She stands out in my recollection as the most abject beggar I saw.
But in Galway there is dirt and squalor and it is picturesque. There in the Claddagh one meets with old hags who are hideous enough and Spanish looking enough to have just left Velasquez's studio, where one can imagine them posing as models for some masterpiece of the great realist.
Barefooted they are, and the homely ones have a great desire to be photographed. Many and many were the pretty women I saw in Ireland, but my camera recorded but few of their lineaments, while I was asked more than once by plain women to take their pictures.
One nailed me as I was passing her vegetable shop in the Claddagh. She was cross-eyed, poor thing, and in a land where pretty features are as plentiful as blackberries, she was plain, but she besought me to take her picture.
Now, when a woman asks you to photograph her you don't feel like refusing her, and I was too much of a novice to make a feint at snapping the shutter and passing on, so I stopped and tried to see a picture in the carrots and cabbages that were displayed at the door.
Such a simpering, conscious face as she displayed! I tried to engage her in talk so that she would at least look naturally homely, but it was no use. Every time my finger strayed up to the little lever her lips would become set in a smile, one eye would look at the camera and one would look at me, and she would become the incarnation of consciousness.
At last I snapped her and passed on. After that I took good care to hurry past plain women.
The day before, at a railway station, I had gone in to get a bit of lunch and discovered that one of the waitresses was a little beauty. The thought came into my head, What a model for "An Irish Beauty," just as one of the others, who had no claim to beauty, said, "Take me picture?"