TO MARKET AND BACK FOR SIXPENCE.
SEVERAL DELUSIONS.
The Irish girl is always comely, and, properly clothed and fed, would be beautiful; still she is comely. Irish landlordism has not been sufficient to destroy her beauty, although it has done its best. But she has no gown of woolen stuff—a cotton slip, without underclothing of any kind, makes up her costume. The comfortable stockings and stout shoes, and the red kerchief about her neck, are so many libels upon Irish landlordism. Were My Lord’s agent to see such clothing upon a girl, he would immediately raise the rent upon her father, and confiscate those clothes. And he would keep on raising the rent till he was certain that shoes and stockings would be forever impossible. Neither does she dance Pat down at rustic balls, for a most excellent reason—there are no balls; and, besides, when she has cut and dried a donkey load of peat, and walked beside that donkey, barefooted in the cold mud, twelve miles and back again, and sold that peat for a sixpence, she is not very much in the humor for dancing down any one. On the contrary, she is mighty glad to get into her wretched bed of dried leaves, and pull over her the potato sack which constitutes her sole covering, and, soothed to sleep by the gruntings of the pigs in the wretched cabin, forget landlords and rent, and go off into the land of happiness, which to her is America. She finds in sleep surcease of sorrow, and, besides, it refreshes her to the degree of walking barefooted through the mud twenty-four miles on the morrow, to sell another load of peat for sixpence, that she may pay more money to My Lord Bantry, whose town-house in London, and whose mistresses in Paris, require a great deal of money. Champagne and the delicacies of the season are always expensive; and My Lord’s appetite, and the appetite of his wife and mistresses, and his children, legitimate and illegitimate, are delicate. Clearly, Katy is in no humor for dancing. She has her share to contribute to all these objects. And so she eats her meal of potato or stirabout—she never has both at once—and goes into sleep and dreams.
THE REAL IRISH GIRL.
As to the priest, there never was a wilder delusion than exists in the minds of the American people concerning him. I was at the houses, or rather lodgings, of a great many of them, but one example will suffice.