Wanderings in Ireland

by Michael Myers Shoemaker

"Yes,—but have you ever tried to talk to them?"

"Just recall that lot at Mallow the other day. Could any party on the surface be more unattractive?"

"You are quite correct, but if you had spoken to that most aggressive looking man and his more aggressive looking wife and daughter, you would have discovered well educated and intelligent people, such as form the real backbone of a nation. They have consumed six summers travelling in Norway alone, and thoroughly appreciate that beautiful country. They believe that the world is a better book than any ever enclosed between covers, and they intend to read it, and when the years bring old age upon them, all that world will still be an open volume, its changes and improvements fully appreciated and understood. Can you not excuse much that is unpleasant in people like these? And do they not compare favourably with the masses of English of a certain class found all over Europe."

As for the sentiments of one nation for another, it is summed up in the words of a recent author, "Moreover, the fine old dislike which Bretons bestow upon everything outside Brittany was hers both by inheritance and careful cultivation." There you have it in a nutshell,—not only as regards the English but all other nations. England certainly holds that feeling towards all the continent and I believe towards America; Boston has it for all the rest of our land. New York has of late years become more liberal, more cosmopolitan, yet I heard but lately a man make the remark in her best club that he had "a perfect horror of the middle West." How does that sound from an educated man in this twentieth century, and of cities which have long since passed their centennial? To be sure, far from being a criterion for the citizens of New York, he was one who had kept his nose down on the books of some counting-house and had never left the confines of the city.

As for California, I have known the dislike of everything outside of that State, especially Eastern, to separate husband and wife and destroy a family; where the wife's hatred of "outsiders" extended from her husband's parents to and including every friend he had in the East,—an impersonal sort of hatred because she was stranger to most of them, yet none the less violent, with the result as stated.

Again, did not such a feeling have something to do with our Civil War? Does not England even to-day believe that the cultivation was largely in the South, and yet how unjust such an opinion! I am half Southern, my mother's family having been slave-owners for generations, and I think I can speak without prejudice, and I say again "how unjust such an opinion." The cultivation in the South was sprinkled over a sparsely settled country and centred in a few thousands of planters and their families. In the North, it covered all of a densely populated section, and from ocean to ocean it would have been impossible to find a class like the mountaineers of Virginia, so ignorant that many of them not only could not read but did not know what "reading" meant. Furthermore where were, and still are, all the greater universities and seats of learning? In the North. Where did our great poets and essayists come from? The North again. I do not desire to decry the South,—far from it,—but the old idea was an absurdity; the South in her palmiest ante-bellum days sent the majority of her sons north to be educated, but——

Bridge in the meantime is over for to-night and the group before the fire increased thereby. So the talk drifts on and on. I am not given to slang and do not like it, but I happened to use a bit just here, "he monkeyed with a buzz saw." Attracted by the silence which followed I looked up to find every face gazing upon me in puzzled amazement, until finally Major—— felt that some explanation must be forthcoming.

"Monkeyed with a buzz saw? Now let me see, let me see. What exactly is a 'buzz saw,' and what happened to the monkey?"

My laughter forced them all to join in and for the next hour these defenders of the British flag took a lesson in American slang, until upon the soft air outside sounded the notes of the "last post" (or "taps" as we call it), the saddest bit of melody in the world of music, and so "good night," "good night." One by one the lights went out and sleep settled upon the living while the moon, turning her attention elsewhere, went off to light the fairies dancing on the river and the witches down in old Ballybeg Abbey.