In travelling through Ireland, a stranger is very frequently puzzled by the singular ways, and especially by the idiomatic equivocation, characteristic of every Irish peasant. Some years back, more particularly, these men were certainly originals—quite unlike any other people whatever. Many an hour of curious entertainment has been afforded me by their eccentricities; yet, though always fond of prying into the remote sources of these national peculiarities, I must frankly confess that, with all my pains, I never was able to develop half of them, except by one sweeping observation; namely, that the brains and tongues of the Irish are somehow differently formed or furnished from those of other people. Phrenology may be a very good science; but the heads of the Irish would puzzle the very best of its professors. Very few of those belonging to the peasantry, indeed, leave the world in the same shape they came into it. After twenty years of age, the shillelah quite alters the natural formation, and leaves so many hills and hollows upon their skulls, that the organ of fighting is the only one discoverable to any certainty.
One general hint which I beg to impress upon all travellers in Hibernia, is this: that if they show a disposition toward kindness, together with a moderate familiarity, and affect to be inquisitive, whether so or not, the Irish peasant will outdo them tenfold in every one of these dispositions. But if a man is haughty and overbearing, he had better take care of himself.
I have often heard it remarked and complained of by travellers and strangers, that they never could, when on a journey, get a true answer from any Irish peasant as to distances. For many years I myself thought it most unaccountable. If you meet a peasant on your road, and ask him how far, for instance, to Ballinrobe, he will probably say it is, “three short miles!” You travel on, and are informed by the next peasant you meet, “that it is five long miles!” On you go, and the next will tell “your honour” it is “a long mile, or about that same!” The fourth will swear “if your honour stops at three miles, you’ll never get there!” But, on pointing to a town just before you, and inquiring what place that is, he replies,
“Oh! plaze your honour, that’s Ballinrobe, sure enough!”
“Why you said it was more than three miles off!”
“Oh yes! to be sure and sartain, that’s from my own cabin, plaze your honour.—We’re no scholards in this country. Arrah! how can we tell any distance, plaze your honour, but from our own little cabins? Nobody but the schoolmaster knows that, plaze your honour.”
Thus is the mystery unravelled. When you ask any peasant the distance of the place you require, he never computes it from where you then are, but from his own cabin; so that, if you asked twenty, in all probability you would have as many different answers, and not one of them correct. But it is to be observed, that frequently you can get no reply at all, unless you understand Irish.
In parts of Kerry and Mayo, however, I have met with peasants who speak Latin not badly. On the election of Sir John Brown for the county of Mayo, Counsellor Thomas Moore and I went down as his counsel. The weather was desperately severe. At a solitary inn, where we were obliged to stop for horses, we requested dinner; upon which, the waiter laid a cloth that certainly exhibited every species of dirt ever invented. We called, and remonstrating with him, ordered a clean cloth. He was a low fat fellow, with a countenance perfectly immoveable, and seeming to have scarcely a single muscle in it. He nodded, and on our return to the room, (which we had quitted during the interval,) we found, instead of a clean cloth, that he had only folded up the filthy one into the thickness of a cushion, and replaced it with great solemnity. We now scolded away in good earnest. He looked at us with the greatest sang-froid, said sententiously, “Nemo me impune lacessit!” and turned his back on us.
He kept his word; when we had proceeded about four miles in deep snow, through a desperate night, and on a bleak bog-road, one of the wheels came off the carriage, and down we went! We were at least three miles from any house. The driver cursed (in Irish) Michael the waiter, who, he said, “had put a bran new wheel upon the carriage, which had turned out to be an old one, and had broken to pieces. It must be the devil,” continued he, “that changed it. Bad luck to you, Michael the waiter, any how! He’s nothin else but a treacherous blackguard, plaze your honour!”
We had to march through the snow to a wretched cottage, and sit up all night in the chimney corner, covered with ashes and smoke, and in company with one of the travelling fools who are admitted and welcomed for good luck in every cabin, whilst a genuine new wheel was got ready for the morning.