Scarcely had Mike concluded when my door was suddenly burst open, and Sir Harry Boyle, without assuming any of his usual precautions respecting silence and quiet, rushed into the room, a broad grin upon his honest features, and his eyes twinkling in a way that evidently showed me something had occurred to amuse him.
“By Jove, Charley, I mustn’t keep it from you; it’s too good a thing not to tell you. Do you remember that very essenced young gentleman who accompanied Sir George Dashwood from Dublin, as a kind of electioneering friend?”
“Do you mean Mr. Prettyman?”
“The very man; he was, you are aware, an under-secretary in some government department. Well, it seems that he had come down among us poor savages as much from motives of learned research and scientific inquiry, as though we had been South Sea Islanders; report had gifted us humble Galwayans with some very peculiar traits, and this gifted individual resolved to record them. Whether the election week might have sufficed his appetite for wonders I know not; but he was peaceably taking his departure from the west on Saturday last, when Phil Macnamara met him, and pressed him to dine that day with a few friends at his house. You know Phil; so that when I tell you Sam Burke, of Greenmount, and Roger Doolan were of the party, I need not say that the English traveller was not left to his own unassisted imagination for his facts. Such anecdotes of our habits and customs as they crammed him with, it would appear, never were heard before; nothing was too hot or too heavy for the luckless cockney, who, when not sipping his claret, was faithfully recording in his tablet the mems. for a very brilliant and very original work on Ireland.
“Fine country, splendid country; glorious people,—gifted, brave, intelligent, but not happy,—alas! Mr. Macnamara, not happy. But we don’t know you, gentlemen,—we don’t indeed,—at the other side of the Channel. Our notions regarding you are far, very far from just.”
“I hope and trust,” said old Burke, “you’ll help them to a better understanding ere long.”
“Such, my dear sir, will be the proudest task of my life. The facts I have heard here this evening have made so profound an impression upon me that I burn for the moment when I can make them known to the world at large. To think—just to think that a portion of this beautiful island should be steeped in poverty; that the people not only live upon the mere potatoes, but are absolutely obliged to wear the skins for raiment, as Mr. Doolan has just mentioned to me!”
“‘Which accounts for our cultivation of lumpers,’ added Mr. Doolan, ‘they being the largest species of the root, and best adapted for wearing apparel.’
“‘I should deem myself culpable—indeed I should—did I not inform my countrymen upon the real condition of this great country.’
“‘Why, after your great opportunities for judging,’ said Phil, ‘you ought to speak out. You’ve seen us in a way, I may fairly affirm, few Englishmen have, and heard more.’