With the rapid flight of the motor, new life rushes through one's veins, and surely some years must drop away.
It is an error to imagine that an automobile tour means merely a rapid flight through the country. It may be made just that, and no doubt often is, but on the other hand it will be found that those who love to travel, love antiquities, are students of history, will see far more by the use of a car than would have been possible with stage-coach or by rail. By the former, progress was slow, and so tedious often that many points of great interest were given up because of the bodily weariness necessary in reaching them. With rail I know, from personal experience, that I allowed years to pass without visiting points which I greatly longed to see, because it necessitated change of trains and weary waiting in dirty stations. With a motor one is possessed almost of Aladdin's lamp. Make your wish, turn a crank, glide over the earth almost as rapidly as the owner of the lamp did through the air, and behold you have your heart's desire, and so you have many desires of the heart and spy out the land as you never would have done in days gone by,—days which seem so long gone by, though but a few years have passed since those old modes of transit were the only ones known. You may go as slowly as you desire in a motor, you cannot in a train. You are able also to glide rapidly over long, tedious roads of no interest, where with horses hours of wearisome journey would be necessary.
So, my dear critic, don't condemn a book of notes written from a motor until you have tried that method of locomotion and found it wanting, which, to my thinking, will never occur. This journey to Bannow, but better still my inspection of the island of Achill is a case in point. Not satisfied with my first visit, I determined to return. I was then in Wexford, quite on the other side of the island, but that was, with a motor, no barrier. I simply crossed the island in a day's run, spent another day in Achill, and returned to Wexford.
Had the time been twenty years or ten years ago, the trouble of a second visit would have destroyed all chances of making it.
It is very dreamy and poetic to sigh over the old dead days, but it's all bosh. The modern appliances of the twentieth century enable the traveller to see more and at his leisure in one summer than he would ever have dreamed of seeing in those "dear old dead days."
The time will come when these machines will be made for the people and general utility. I venture to quote here an article from Harper's Weekly as to the future of this great invention.
Deserted Killshening House
Fermoy