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The little town of Kenmare is very pleasantly and healthfully placed. Mr. Frazer says that the bay, by which it stands, is the most beautiful in all Ireland, but we did not see enough of it to corroborate this grand eulogium. With the exception of the handsome Suspension Bridge, neat Church, and National Schools, the buildings are mean and miserable. To judge from the size of the Post-Office and “Bridewell,” there is very little correspondence or crime. At the broken windows of “the Female Industrial School,” we saw two young girls, of such industrious habits, that they had not had time to wash themselves. “The Dispensary,” I presume, had cured everybody, for we saw no signs of surgeon, surgery, or patients,—only a dingy old hen in the passage, who, probably, had overlayed herself, or had contracted that prevailing malady, “the Gapes,” the name whereof makes one yawn in writing it. Undoubtedly, the edifice which pleased us the most, was a narrow, tumble-down hut of two small stories, and one of these securely shuttered, which announced itself to the world as “Michael Brenan's Tea and Coffee Rooms, with Lodging and Stabling.
Leaving Kenmare (and is not that a sweet little cottage, on the right as you rise the hill, with the hydrangea glowing amid the dark evergreens, like hope in seasons of sorrow?), we met some scores of the peasantry, grave and decorous, on their way, the driver told us, to a funeral. Whence did they come? Between Kenmare and Glen-garriff we saw very few habitations, yet troops of children came running after the car as heretofore, amply demonstrating that the Irish Paterfamilias knows more of Addition and Multiplication than of the Frenchman's Rule-of-Three (“two boys and a girl are a family for a king”), and ever finds himself in a satisfactory position to converse with his enemies in the gate. The stern Lycurgus, who, according to Plutarch, was so very severe upon the unmarried Spartans, that he made them walk in procession, more scantily' draped than their statues, though the promenade took place in winter, and compelled them to sing songs derisive of celibacy, chaffing themselves to music, as they walked along,—would be gratified indeed, if he could revisit the earth, and see what Ireland is doing with a grand fecundity, for the Census of 1861.
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The vestments of these juveniles again attracted our notice, reminding us—
“Of love, that never found its earthly close?”
for some of them must have been about as cool as Cupid, and suggesting that impatience, with regard to apparel, which characterised of old even the Kings of Ireland.