My harsh critics of the London and North-Western express would doubtless have found the soft, flattering ways of the Irish false and hypocritical. One remembers the famous compliment, “No matter what age you are, ma’am, you don’t look it,” and the historical compliment of the Irish coal-porter to one of the beautiful Gunnings: “Sure, I could light my pipe by the fire of her eye.”
Sometimes a compliment or a wheedling good wish will take a sudden turn. “May the blessin’ of God go afther you!” says an Irish beggar—“may the blessin’ of God go afther you!” The desired alms not being forthcoming, the blessing flows naturally into—“and never overtake you.”
The beggars are great wits, of a sardonic kind usually. A rather short friend of mine walking with his tall sister, the two were importuned fruitlessly by a beggar-woman. Before they passed out of hearing she called gently to the lady: “Well, there you go! And goodness help the poor little crathur that hadn’t the spirit to say no to you.” This double insult to the supposed husband and wife was very neat.
A matter-of-fact young sister of mine, having been begged from by a ragged woman with a string of ragged children at one end of the village, was importuned at the other end by a man, similarly accompanied, whom she took rightly to be the woman’s mate. “We’re poor orphans,” whined the second string of children; “our poor mother’s dead and buried.” “I don’t believe it,” she said; “I met your mother at the other end of the village.” “Take no notice of her, childer,” said the man sorrowfully. “It wouldn’t be right to touch a penny of her money. She’s an unbeliever—that’s what she is.”
An old beggar-man, to whom I explained apologetically that I was without my purse, looked at me benevolently. “Never mind!” he said; “you’d give it if you had it, wouldn’t you? But there’s one thing I want to tell you: your dog’s gone home without you.” I don’t quite know how it was meant, but it conveyed to me a sense of well-meaning failure and inefficiency generally.
The salutations in Ireland used to be delightful. I hope it may be long before they are out of date. “God save you kindly,” was the salutation on the roadside. “God save all here!” you said, entering a house. And if any work was in progress, you said: “God bless the work!” If they were churning in the kitchen as you entered it, with the old up-and-down dasher or “dash,” as I knew it, you took a few turns with the dash lest you should carry off the butter. Butter and milk are things often charmed away. When I was a young girl, there was at Lucan, in the county Dublin, a fairy doctor, who was called in if the cows weren’t milking well, or the butter didn’t come to the churn, or if the beasts were ailing. A more Christian thing was to bring the live-stock to the priest to be blessed, or to bring the priests to the field to bless them, which is done every year. Even the Orangeman of the North, if he has a cow ailing, thinks it not amiss to ask for the priest’s blessing. All the same, the Irish Celts, in their superstitions, have a way of rounding on their good friends, the priests. Priests’ marriages—that is, marriages arranged by the priests—are proverbially unlucky. And to buy the priest’s cow in a fair is notoriously unlucky for the general dealing of the day, as well as that particular one.
