“And you have paid your passage-money?”
“Yes, ma’am, I must go there anyhow, now.”
“Oh, Bessie, Bessie, why would you never come to school and learn geography? You are going to a terrible place, far away from your sister. That wicked agent has cheated you horribly.”
The poor girl went to New Orleans, and there died of fever. The birds of passage and fish which pass from sea to sea seem more capable of knowing what they are about than the greater number of the emigrants driven by scarcely less blind an instinct. Out of the three millions who are said to have gone since the famine from Ireland to America, how many must there have been who had no more knowledge than poor Bessie Mahon of the land to which they went!
Before I conclude these reminiscences of Irish peasant life in the Forties, I must mention an important feature of it—the Priests. Most of those whom I saw in our villages were disagreeable-looking men with the coarse mouth and jaw of the Irish peasant undisguised by the beards and whiskers worn by their lay brethren; and often the purple and bloated appearance of their cheeks suggested too abundant diet of bacon and whisky-punch. They worried me dreadfully by clearing out all the Catholic children from my school every now and then on the pretence of withdrawing them from heretical instruction, though nothing was further from the thoughts or wishes of any of us than proselytizing; nor was a single charge ever formulated against our teachers of saying a word to the children against their religion. What the priests really wanted was to obstruct education itself and too close and friendly intercourse with Protestants. For several winters I used to walk down to the school on certain evenings in the week and give the older lads and lassies lessons in Geography (with two huge maps of the world which I made myself, 11 ft. by 9 ft.!) and the first steps in Astronomy and history. Several times, when the class had been well got together and began to be interested, the priest announced that he would give them lessons on the same night, and they were to come to him instead of to me. Of course I told them to do so, and that I was very glad he would take the trouble. A fortnight or so later however I always learnt that the priest’s lessons had dropped and all was to be recommenced.
The poor woman I mentioned above as so devoted to her mother went to service with one of the priests in the neighbourhood in the hope that she would receive religious consolation from him. Meeting her some time after I expressed my hope that she had found it. “Ah, no Ma’am!” she answered sorrowfully, “He never spakes to me unless about the bacon or the like of that. Priests does be dark!” I thought the phrase wonderfully significant.
My father, though a Protestant of the Protestants as the reader has learned, thought it right to send regularly every year a cheque to the priest of Donabate as an aid to his slender resources; and there never was openly, anything but civility between the successive curés and ourselves. We bowed most respectfully to each other on the roads, but I never interchanged a word with any of them save once when I was busy attending a poor woman in Balisk in the cramps of cholera; the disease being at the time raging through the country. With the help of the good souls who in Ireland are always ready for any charitable deed, I was applying mustard poultices, when Father M—— entered the cabin (a revolting looking man he was, whose nose had somehow been frost-bitten), and turned me out. I implored him to defer, or at least hasten his ministrations; and stood outside the door in great impatience for half an hour while I knew the hapless patient was in agony and peril of death, inside. At last the priest came out,—and when I hurried back to the bedside I found he had been gumming some “Prayers to the Holy Virgin” on the wall. Happily we were not too late with our mustard and “sperrits,” and the woman was saved; whether by Father M—— and the Virgin or by me I cannot pretend to say.
I have spoken of our village school and must add that the boys and girls who attended it were exceedingly clever and bright. They caught up ideas, were moved by heroic or pathetic stories and understood jokes to a degree quite unmatched by English children of the same humble class, as I found later when I taught in Miss Carpenter’s Ragged Schools at Bristol. The ingenuity with which, when they came to a difficult word in reading, they substituted another was very diverting. One boy read that St. John had a leathern griddle about his loins; and a young man with a deep manly voice, once startled me by announcing, “He casteth out divils through,—through, through,—Blazes, the chief of the Divils!”
In Drumcar school a child, elaborately instructed by dear, good Lady Elizabeth M‘Clintock concerning Pharisees, and then examined:—“What was the sin of the Pharisees?” replied promptly: “Ating camels, my lady!”
Alas, I have reason to fear that the erudition of my little scholars, if quickly obtained, was far from durable. Paying a visit to my old home ten years later I asked my crack scholar, promoted to be second gardener at Newbridge, “Well, Andrew, how much do you remember of all my lessons?”