One thing surprises in those endless pastures—it is to count so few grazing beasts on them. Not that they are altogether excluded; now and then one perceives on the intense green of the fields reddish or white spots that are cattle or sheep, the rounded haunch of a mare, the awkward frolics of a foal. On the brinks of rivers that one can almost always cross wading, one sometimes sees a few happy cows, their feet in the water, wide-eyed and munching dreamily. Here and there one sees geese, hens escorted by their chicks, pigs fraternally wallowing with children in the muddy ditch. But in a general way the landscape is wanting in animated life, and as poor in domestic animals as in labourers.
As a contrast game is plentiful, as is natural in a land that is three-quarters uncultivated, where it is forbidden to carry arms, and where shooting is the exclusive privilege of a very small minority. Hares and rabbits seem to enjoy their immunity to the utmost, and everywhere their white breeches are seen scudding away in the dewy grass like fireworks.
Villages are rare, and rarer still is farmhouse or homestead. Undulating ridges succeed to undulating ridges and still one sees no trace of any dwellings. One might think that these stone walls radiating over the fields had sprung there of their own accord, and that the hay is doomed to rot standing, after feeding the butterflies. Yet that cannot be—evidently some one must come now and then to cut this grass, make it into stacks and carry it away.... At last, by dint of stretching neck and legs you succeed in discovering far away on the horizon a spire that belongs to a big borough, a market-town rather, where those civic tillers of the soil dwell in houses similar to those of the liberties in Dublin.
As for the mud cabin, generally described as the Irish peasant’s only home, it is now a thing of the past. One would hardly, and after much research, find some specimens of it in the farthest counties, at the end of Kerry or Mayo.
True to say, when found, those specimens leave nothing to be desired for poverty and discomfort; no fire-place, no windows, no furniture; nothing but a roof of turf supported by a few poles on mud walls. The very pig that formerly shared its luxuries with the genus homo and indicated a certain degree of relative comfort in his possessor, the pig himself has disappeared for ever.
But those are exceptions, almost pre-historic cases. As a rule the mud cabin has been blotted out from the Irish soil—perhaps enlightened landlords systematically pursued its eradication; perhaps the peasants, tired of its tutelary protection, emigrated under other skies,—or more simply still, they took advantage of the last famine to die of hunger. Upon which came the rain, and two or three years sufficed to dilute the walls, render the mud house to the common reservoir, and wash out its very remembrance.
The population of Ireland, it must be borne in mind, has been steadily decreasing for half a century. It was of 8,175,124 inhabitants in 1841; of 6,552,385 in 1851; 5,798,584 in 1861; 5,412,377 in 1871; and 5,174,836 in 1881. By all appearances it must now have sunk under five millions. If this fish-eating race was not the most prolific under the sun it would have been blotted out long ago from the face of this planet.