The Ridgefield Irish were a noted community. They all came from one county, and were marked to a surprising degree by their personal beauty. There were Esmonds and Desmonds, Considines, Burkes, and McCanns, and two names now gone (except for one old representative) Guilfoyles and Guilshannons. Four lovely Esmond girls of one family are now growing up, bearing four saints’ names—Agatha, Ursula, Patricia, Cecily.
Honoria Considine walks down our street, beautiful creature that she is, with a port and carriage that a princess might envy. She has brought up an orphaned nephew and niece to capability and prosperity, supporting them entirely by her sewing. The Considines have possessions which show that they came to this country as something more than farmers. They have a little old silver, two finely inlaid card-tables in the farm “best-room,” and two larger mahogany tables. They are great prohibitionists, and would be shocked, good souls, to know that what they call the “old refrigerator” is a beautifully carved wine-cooler!
Lawrence McCann and Joe Fitzgerald were two as handsome creatures as ever were seen, with great dark blue eyes, delicate brows, dark curls, and mantling Irish color.
Lawrence died of consumption at twenty-four, as did his cousin, delightful Con Guilshannon, but Joe did well and married. The other day I saw him out walking with three little rosy children, all with penciled eyebrows and very dark blue eyes.
There lives an old lady in a great western city (I don’t give its name) who ought to wear a crown instead of a bonnet. The town trembles before her masterful benevolence. Her magnificent house dominates the “best community,” and her six middle-aged married children, established near-by in houses of equal magnificence, do not dare call their souls their own.
A neighbor of mine was in her city last year, and was taken to see her. The old lady seemed to know an amazing amount, not only about our far-away eastern State, but about our actual county. She finally showed such an absorbing interest in particular households that my friend said:
“But how can you know? How can you have heard about so-and-so?”
“Child,” said the old chieftainess, her fine eyes twinkling and filling, “My name is no guide to you now, except that it’s Irish, but I was born and brought up in your county. I was an Esmond from Ridgefield, and had my schooling at the convent, not six miles from your door.”
After Ridgefield, with its deserted convent, you come presently to where the rolling country is suddenly flung amazingly apart in the chasm-like valley of the Winding River. Weir’s Mills, the village at the head of navigation, is a pleasant peaceful little place, a very old settlement, with a noted old church.
A neighbor of ours, a man now of eighty, has told me that in his childhood at Weir’s Mills, the school had neither paper nor blackboard nor slates for the children to write on. The teacher smoothed the ashes of the hearthstone out flat with a shingle, and the children did their figuring on that. Farmers going into town chalked the figures of their sales on their beaver hats, and the assessor chalked the taxes up on the doors.