The quaint figures which one encountered in America thirty years ago must have come from here. Boarding ship in yonder harbour they landed on our shores absolutely unchanged and unique. One never sees them nowadays. Even in Ireland they are to be met with only in the remote districts; they are here in the good city of Galway but you will look for them in vain farther east.
The story of the first appearance of my dear old nurse upon the streets of our city has become a household tale with us. Just in from the "owld country," she decked herself in her best for her Sunday's outing. A gown of the most vivid emerald green whose skirt spread over a voluminous hoop was composed of four huge flounces bound in bright red; a huge bonnet of green and blue circled around her anything but classic countenance—certainly her nose could never have been called "Roman"; she carried an orange and green sunshade. Her appearance created a sensation which almost ended in a riot. She was too much for the American youth as he was for her, and she fled homeward pursued by a howling mob of the gamins.
I must pay tribute to the women who have come to us from this island,—respected and self-respecting, they have proven most excellent servants, with never a shadow of immorality amongst any of them, thoroughly honest and upright, and during months of absence, and sometimes years, left in entire charge of the households of which they kept as perfect watch and ward as though they were indeed their own, and, in fact, they soon learned to look upon the dwellings of their employer as home, with no desire to change unless to marry and set up their own firesides, and even then they never have forgotten and often return to the places where they lived so long through days of sorrow and days of mirth, not only servants but friends in the best acceptation of that word.
Ffranckfort Castle