DUBLIN, April 10, 1820.
In my letter to my mother of the 8th I forgot—no, I had not time to say that we had a restive mare at Dunshaughlin, who paid me for all I ever wrote about Irish posting, and put me in the most horrible and reasonable apprehension that she would have broken my aunt's carriage to pieces against the corner of a wall. The crowd of people that assembled, the shouts, the "never fears," the scolding of the landlord and postillions, and the group surveying the scene, was beyond anything I could or can paint. The stage coach drove to the door in the midst of it, and ladies and bandboxes stopped, and all stood to gaze.
There was also a professional fool in his ass cart with two dogs, one a white little curly dog, who sat upon the ass's head behind his ears, and another a black shaggy mongrel, with longish ears, who sat up in a begging attitude on the hinder part of the ass, and whom the fool-knave had been tutoring with a broken crutch, as he sat in his covered cart. Fanny made a drawing of him, and he and his dogs sat for a fivepenny, which I honestly gave him for his and his dogs' tricks.
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Steamboats had only begun to ply between Dublin and Holyhead in 1819, and Maria Edgeworth's first experience of a steamboat was in crossing now to Holyhead. She disliked the jigging motion, which she said was like the shake felt in a carriage when a pig is scratching himself against the hind wheel while waiting at an Irish inn door.
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MARIA to MISS HONORA EDGEWORTH.
MRS. WATT'S, HEATHFIELD,
April 1820.
I was much surprised at finding that the postillion who drove us from Wolverhampton could neither tell himself, nor learn from any one up the road, along the heath, at the turnpike, or even in the very suburbs of Birmingham, the way to Mr. Watt's! I was as much surprised as we were at Paris in searching for Madame de Genlis; so we went to Mr. Moilliet's, and stowed ourselves next day into their travelling landau, as large as our own old, old delightful coach, and came here.