I had taken tea before my arrival, and Mrs. Collins gave me some milk. She and her husband had been to Cork, where, she said, they had a cup of tea and a penny bun at a baker’s. (The penny is about two cents.) In the evening we had a good talk. I commented on the nice hen-house standing in the corner, and Mrs. Collins told me that they had lost several chickens by the fox. “And do you still have foxes in Ireland?” I asked, in some surprise.
“We do,” she replied.
“And that is what the gentlemen hunt?”
“It is,” she said.
“And can you kill the foxes?” I inquired.
“No, ma’am,” was the reply.
This I afterward thought must be an error, as foxes are vermin; but a gentleman born in the north of Ireland has told me that they would be evicted for killing foxes. Sometimes hunting clubs pay for poultry killed by foxes.
In the evening I spoke of the sun’s setting so late and our being so far north, and asked the eldest son, a youth of fourteen, whether he had studied geography. He said he had, but his mother told me that he had been obliged to leave school at eleven, and her manner seemed sad and disapproving. There are no free schools in Ireland like ours. The poorest citizens need not pay in the national schools, but others must. A gentleman in Dublin, who publishes a school journal, told me that he doubted whether these schools would ever become entirely free to the public, like those in my own State. He had never heard that such a movement was contemplated.
In further conversation Mrs. Collins told me that they had lost seven cows in eighteen months, and that they were nearly broken down. They had to incur some debt to replace them, and they must meet the rent or be thrown upon the world. Their lease would expire in about six years. Do not these misfortunes make them dwell very near to the Divine Father, in humble submission and prayer?
About ten o’clock in the evening the wooden table was put before the fireplace. The old aunt had gone to bed. Collins was in one end of the fireplace, a boy asleep in the other, and the eldest slept on the settle. Mrs. Collins made tea and put a bowl of white sugar on the table. She told me that sugar cost about five cents a pound (two and a halfpence). They cut pieces off of the great cake baked in the Dutch oven, and ate their supper without any of the precious butter, which must go to market. Little Norah had given a low laugh when her mother handed her a bit of warm cake without anything spread on it. Mr. and Mrs. Collins had milk in their tea. The tea cost about forty cents a pound. Collins helped himself quite freely to the cheap and nutritious sugar, one of the blessings which the poor man owes to free trade.