"Pennsylvania Dutch," and other essays

by Phebe Earle Gibbons

Collins and his wife gave up their own room to me. It was the other room on the ground-floor. It also had an earthen floor, with perhaps the addition of a little cement, but it was not level. There I slept, and here were set my simple meals, more luxurious, however, than their own. Some of the dishes were of china, which belonged to Collins’s grandmother. I had plenty of milk, eggs, butter, tea, and baker’s bread. They gave me goat’s milk, richer than cow’s milk, for tea. For me especially Mrs. Collins procured meat, a bit of jowl, but I am not partial to it. They did not, however, go to the extravagance of eating it themselves. I was told of a farmer’s family who had jowl and cabbage for a Sunday dinner. A watch was set for the agent, lest, seeing such evidences of prosperity, he might raise the rent. Collins and his wife seldom ate meat. He told me that he had two eggs in the morning and the mistress one. They raised turkeys. Twenty-four were running with one hen. The servant fed them with a mixture of nettles, corn mush, and thick milk, but she said they scarcely ever ate a turkey even at Christmas.

In the morning, at breakfast, Mrs. Collins had some cold mush or stirabout cut up and boiled in sheep’s milk. This saved bread and tea. I observed one day within the back door, and by the chicken-coop, a little trough with corn-meal. There seemed to be always food there. The chickens came in and helped themselves. Seeing a fowl eating, I said to the aunt, “That rooster ought to be fat.” She did not understand me, and I tried again:

“That cock ought to be fat, he eats so much.”

“He do ate a dale, God bless him,” she said. She meant “prosper him,” I think. Some neighbors visited the family one morning, and from my room I heard earnest talk. They spoke of the rumored arrest of Father Murphy, which had caused much excitement. One man came in who was full of talk of the Cork races on the preceding day. At first, Mrs. Collins allowed him to think that they were present, but they went to sell butter, and did not go to the race-ground.

The girl swept the earthen floor with a bunch of twigs without a handle. I mention these little things to show the poverty of the country. They had no almanacs at Collins’s and no clock, except a Connecticut one, which did not run. Collins once intimated that it was painful to have such a poor harness for his horse.

One day I walked over to the school. I passed a house licensed to sell beer and spirits to be drunk on the premises. It was whitewashed, and looked better than most of the farm-houses. The boys told me that tea and sugar could be bought there. Bread was sold, but I could buy no sticks of candy for the children. A carpenter-shop and a blacksmith’s forge stood near this public-house, but I saw no country stores like ours at home.

The Collins family carried water some distance uphill from a spring. This part of the country is supplied from springs. They had excellent roads, apparently macadamized, and free from tolls. When I spoke in Cork of the great cost of such roads I was told that they were probably made after the famine, when the government gave laborers employment. The roads, however, seemed deserted. Once I saw a man on horseback, and occasionally market carts were seen, but of plain carriages, like those of the farmers in Eastern Pennsylvania, I remember none. Poverty hangs like a cloud over the land. Yet the people seem honest. The servant-girl at Collins’s said to me, “Nothing do ever be taken.” I wished to know whether it was safe to leave my towels to dry on furze bushes near the road. Afterward, in a gentleman’s house,—a gentleman who lived in a disturbed section, and whose tenants were not paying rent,—I was told that they would not be afraid to have plate in the house; the people there were honest.

Collins and his wife were trying to better their condition by going to a market-town and buying butter, which she brought home and reworked and packed into firkins to sell in Cork. This consumed so much of their time that it was hard for me to see much profit in it. They may have received five dollars a week more than the butter cost them. Mrs. Collins was pleased in telling me of one firkin or tub that brought the highest market price. But during their absence the elder boys were left alone at the farm-work. Nor did I see the great pressure of labor found among our Pennsylvania German farmers. This may be in part owing to open winters in Ireland, which enable the former to work the year round, in part to the fact that the patient, ox-like labor of the German is not a trait of the Irishman, and partly to a national disregard of time, producing such a proverb as “Hours were made for slaves.” When I apologized for having talked so long to a poor man and his wife, she answered, “Sure, many a year we’ll rest in the grave.” Calling on my friend Collins and his wife before I left the county, I found they had gone with their horse to the funeral of a much-respected neighbor, and as they were so long absent, had doubtless accompanied the funeral to the place of interment, twenty miles. A manufacturer in the county Cork said that the Irish girls in the mills are not greedy enough. They would rather have less wages and more play. They were not indolent, but a bit of fun would call them off. A Quaker lady in Cork said to me, “None of the Irish are thrifty. They do not value their time.” And afterward, “They are a thrifty people in the north. They make use of their time.” She herself was born in Ireland, but when she spoke of the Irish she did not mean to include herself. When any one called the Irish lazy, I replied that they did not seem so in America. They left their temperate climate, came to our country, and constructed railroads under our broiling suns. I heard in Ireland that girls who go to America say, “If we had worked as hard in Ireland as we do in America, we would have been well off there.”

I spoke of Mr. and Mrs. Collins’s drinking tea at supper. Once when they were absent, Mary, the servant, came into my room to hide the teapot, lest the boys should want sugar and bread.