‘Mild and moist, I believe, are the epithets; that is, it makes you damp, and it keeps you so.’
‘And the inns?’
‘The inns, it is admitted, might be better; but the traveller is admonished against fastidiousness, and told that the prompt spirit of obligeance, the genial cordiality, he will meet with, are more than enough to repay him for the want of more polished habits and mere details of comfort and convenience.’
‘Rotten humbug! I don’t want cordiality from my innkeeper.’
‘I should think not! As, for instance, a bit of carpet in this room would be worth more than all the courtesy that showed us in.’
‘What was that lake called—the first place I mean?’ asked Lockwood.
‘Lough Brin. I shouldn’t say but with better weather it might be pretty.’
A half-grunt of dissent was all the reply, and Walpole went on—
It’s no use painting a landscape when it is to be smudged all over with Indian ink. There are no tints in mountains swathed in mist, no colour in trees swamped with moisture; everything seems so imbued with damp, one fancies it would take two years in the tropics to dry Ireland.’
‘I asked that fellow who showed us the way here, why he didn’t pitch off those wet rags he wore, and walk away in all the dignity of nakedness.’