In the intervals between the preceeding heats I was introduced to many ladies and gentlemen, all of whom most hospitably invited me to their houses. I however preferred following my young host, who promised to show me the fairest of the fair, if I would give myself up to his guidance, and not object to riding ten miles in the dark. On the way he told me that this lady was called Mrs ——, and was the daughter of the late Dutch governor of ——, that she had had a complaint in the lungs, and was now staying in the solitary village of Athenrye, on account of the salubrity of its air.
We did not arrive till ten; and surprised her in her little cottage (for the place is miserable) at tea.
I wish I could describe this sweet and lovely being to you in such a manner as to place her visibly before you; certain that you, like me, would love her at the first glance. But I feel that here all description falls short:—all about her is heart and soul, and that is not to be described;—she was dressed in black, with the greatest simplicity, her dress up to the neck, but fitting closely to her beautiful form. Her person is slender and extremely youthful, full of gentle grace, and yet not without animation and fire in her movements. Her complexion is of a pure and clear brown, and has the soft polish of marble. More beautiful and brilliant black eyes, or teeth of more dazzling whiteness, I never beheld. Her mouth too, with the angelic, childlike character of her smile, is enchanting.
Her refined unaffected good-breeding, the sportive graces of her gay and witty conversation, were of that rare sort which are innate, and must therefore please, whether in Paris or in Pekin, in town or country. The greatest experience of society could not give more ease or address, and no girl of fifteen could blush more sweetly, or jest more joyously. And yet her life had been the most simple and uniform, and her youth was rather the unfading spring of the soul than that of the body; for she was mother of four children, near thirty, and but just recovered from an attack on the lungs which had threatened to prove fatal. But the fire of all her movements, the lightning-flashes of her conversation, had all the freshness and all the power of youth, imparting a resistless charm to the gentleness of her nature. One felt that this was the child of a warmer and kindlier sun, of a more luxuriant soil, than are to be found in our misty climes. And indeed she felt the most melancholy longings after her native land, and a painful expression passed over all her lovely features as she said, she should never more breathe that balmy air charged with sweet odours. I was too much absorbed in looking at her to think of food, had she not, with all the kind activity of a good housewife, made preparations for entertaining us as well as she could in her little cabin. A table was set in the room in which we sat; so that our frugal meal caused no interruption to the conversation, and it was long after midnight ere we separated.
It was not till I was in bed that I learned that, finding it impossible to get us beds in a place consisting of only a few cabins, this kind-hearted and unceremonious woman had quitted her own for me, and gone to sleep with her eldest daughter.
Concerning her family, whose name was necessarily so striking to me, Mrs —— herself could tell me but little. She had married Mr ——, then a captain in the British army, in her twelfth year: immediately afterwards she lost her father, and embarked with her husband for Ireland, which she has never left. She had heard, indeed that she had relations in Germany, but never corresponded with them. Three years ago she received a business letter from a cousin in A——, announcing that her father’s brother had died and had left her heir to his whole property. The indifference of this African child of nature went so far, that she had not only up to the present time left this letter unanswered, but, as she told me, had never been able to decypher the whole of it, as it was written in Dutch, and she had almost entirely forgotten the language. “I don’t know the man,” added she innocently, “and the money affairs I left to my husband.”
This bathing-place, Athenrye, is also one of the curiosities of Ireland. From what I have already said, you will conclude that no Polish village can have a more wretched aspect. The cluster of cabins is on a bare hill rising out of the bog, without tree or bush, without an inn, without any convenience, inhabited only by ragged beggars, and by the few invalids who bring with them everything they want, and must send for even the most trifling article of food to Galway, a distance of twelve miles. Once it was otherwise; and it saddens one to see at the further extremity of this wretched village the proud ruins of better times. Here stood a rich abbey, now overgrown with ivy: the arches which once protected the sanctuary lie in fragments amid the unsheltered altars and tombstones. Further on is a castle, with walls ten feet thick, in which King John held his court of justice when he came over to Ireland.
I visited these ruins with a most numerous company: I do not exaggerate when I say that at least two hundred half-naked beings, two-thirds of whom were children, had collected round my carriage at a very early hour in the morning, doing nothing: they now thronged round me, all begging, and shouting, “Long life to your honour!” Every individual among them stuck faithfully by me, leaping over stones and brambles. The strangest compliment now and then resounded from the midst of the crowd: at last some called out, “Long life to the King!” On my return I threw two or three handfuls of copper among them; and in a minute half of them, old and young, lay prostrate in the sand, while the others ran with all speed into a whiskey-shop, fighting furiously all the way.
Such is Ireland! Neglected or oppressed by the government, debased by the stupid intolerance of the English priesthood, and marked by poverty and the poison of whiskey, for the abode of naked beggars!—I have already mentioned that even among the educated classes of this province, the ignorance appears, with our notions of education, perfectly unequalled: I will only give you one or two examples. To-day something was said about magnetism, and no one present had ever heard the slightest mention of it. Nay, in B——m, in a company of twenty persons, nobody knew that such places as Carlsbad and Prague existed. The information that they were situated in Bohemia did not mend the matter:—Bohemia was not less unknown; and in short, everything out of Great Britain and Paris was a country in the moon.[129] “And where do you come from?” asked one. “From Brobdignag,” said I in jest. “O! is that on the sea? Have they whiskey there?” asked another. The son of my host, whom I have repeatedly mentioned, asked me one day very seriously as we met some asses, whether there were any such animals in my country? “Ah! but too many,” replied I.
B——m, Sept. 12th.