A gentleman at Cork told me an anecdote of a company of emigrants who were observed passing back and forth on one of the ferry-boats during an entire day, and when questioned in regard to their strange movements, answered, they were bound to America in the next ship, and were “practising at say-sickness, just.” So the tourist in the utmost he may endure on an Atlantic voyage, before crossing the Irish Channel, may have the consolation of knowing that he is but “practising at say-sickness.”
At Kingstown we were treated to a taste of nationality in the shape of a bit of a row between two carmen. At the Dublin station we took that peculiar and distinctive Irish vehicle, an outside jaunting-car, which has the merit of giving you a variety in the way of exercise,—joltings, backward, forward, and sidewise,—a vigilant and vigorous endeavor to keep yourself and your luggage on, and an alert watchfulness to keep other vehicles off. There are two kinds of jaunting-cars, which are thus distinguished by the Irish carmen: “The outside car, yer honor, has the wheels inside, and the inside car has the wheels outside.”...
The route from Dublin to Cork leads mostly through a barren, boggy, miserable country, with here and there an oasis of waving green and gold, telling of careful cultivation and wise husbandry. There are some fine old ruins along the way, among which I best remember those of Kilmallock, Kildare, where the pious nuns once kept the holy fires burning “through long ages of darkness and storm,” Loughman Castle, and the Rocks of Dunamore and Cashel. But all along the line the ruins are almost countless. You grow mortally weary of crumbling turrets, tumble-down gate-ways, battered arches, and staggering towers, all standing out boldly in the sun and storm, for the absence of trees and shrubbery is a marked feature in the agricultural districts of Ireland. Indeed, the larger part of this ill-fated isle seems, in contrast with fruitful, prosperous, beautiful England, a wild, weary, shadowless waste, scathed, peeled, desolated, and abandoned.
On the following morning [after a night spent at Cork], amid golden sunshine and silvery showers, we drove to Blarney Castle, and wandered through those umbrageous grounds immortalized by the poet in the famous song of the “Groves of Blarney.” The castle itself is a noble old ruin, and its situation and surroundings are remarkably picturesque and curious. There are natural subterranean passages leading down to the lake, and a black dungeon, where, according to our guide, “Cromwell, the bloody nagur,” confined his prisoners. The lake is small, but, according to the above-mentioned authority, quite bottomless. He told us, with a grave face, that the late “Lady Jeffers,” having taken a whim into her head to draw it off, had a drain dug full three feet below the surface, but not a drop would run out,—a sturdy, conservative old lake.
We ascended the great tower, at the top of which we all kissed the new Blarney stone,—it being morally and physically impossible for ladies to salute the real Simon Pure, which is outside the wall some feet from the summit. The gentlemen who accomplish this feat must be held by the feet over the wall, one hundred and twenty feet from the ground, by a stout guide, who is liable to be seized with a sudden weakness, and to call out that he must stop “to spit on his hands,”—that he can howld on no longer, unless his fee is double; and the unhappy dog in suspense pledges himself to a treat. Our guide assured me that the new Blarney stone was quite as good as the “rale,”—that a certain “widdy lady” made a pilgrimage all the way from the north of England, kissed the spurious stone most rapturously, and made a great match soon after. The question arises, Lay the virtue in the stone, or in the pilgrim’s faith?
Our return drive was very charming,—the rain was past and sunlight and fresh breezes poured beauty and gladness on our way. I cannot remember to have seen anywhere within so short a distance so many wild flowers. The shrubbery was more luxuriant, the trees finer and more abundant, than we had ever seen,—everything on our path was beautiful and gracious save the humanity, which was wretched and poverty-stricken in the extreme. From the miserable little mud huts along the road ran scores of children, of all sizes, bare-headed, bare-footed, and bare-legged, with rags of all imaginable hues and textures fluttering in the wind, and attached to their bodies by some unknown and mysterious law of attraction, certainly by no visible bond or support. With faces begrimed by smoke, and wild eyes overhung with wilder locks, they stretched out their dirty beseeching palms, and assailed us on all sides of our outside car,—most assailable of vehicles,—fit contrivance for a beggared land.
Irish carmen are a race of Jehus,—driving with eccentric flourishes of the whip, and when more than usually excited, with strange barbaric whoops and hellos, making their odd little vehicles jump along at an astonishing rate. They are commonly communicative and amusing, though by no means the quaint, cunning, delightful, inimitable wags and wits your Lovers and Levers, your Edgeworths and Halls, have pictured. It is a singular thing that, though they are from the first free and easy in word and manner, they are never offensively so. Native tact, good humor, and warmth of heart take from their advances all appearance of boldness or impertinence. Our driver on this occasion was disposed to be particularly sociable, though not in the jocular way. He was a man of much intelligence for his station, of a serious, even sad expression of face, and he talked powerfully and with intense bitterness of the wrongs and sorrows of the Irish peasantry. I was struck by hearing him ascribe most of their sufferings not to the English government but to the native Irish proprietors, who, he averred, had revelled in heartless, wasteful extravagance, while the people starved, until, since the failure of the potato, many of them have been reduced to absolute want. It was almost fearful to mark the wild gleam in the man’s eye as he spoke his fierce joy in this retributive justice....
On the morning of August 16 we left Cork for Killarney, by way of Bantry and Glengariff. After a short run on the rail we took a stage-coach, choosing outside seats, like enthusiastic tourists as we are, though the day was dark and showery. There was little in the scenery, and less in the condition of the country and people, to repay us for our exposure to wind and weather till we reached Bantry. I can never forget the forlorn unmitigated wretchedness of the people who thronged around us at the little town of Dunmanway. Among the crowd appealing to us, in all possible variations of the whine mendicious and mendacious, we saw not one man or woman in the national costume and cover-all,—the double cape great-coat and the hooded cloak; all was squalor and tatters soul-sickening and disgusting. Here was infancy, nude and needy, reaching out its dirty little hands; and second childhood bent and tottering, with palsied palm extended, eying you with all the mute wistfulness of a starved spaniel. There was a full assortment of the halt, the hump-backed, and the crippled,—all degrees of sightlessness and unsightliness. I turned away from the miserable creatures with a heart heavy with hopeless sympathy and vain pity, and with a conscience stricken for all my own sins of unthankfulness and discontent.
And here I may as well pause to remark briefly on the condition and appearance of the peasants in the south of Ireland. Knowing that I could not fairly judge of this class by the idle and ragged crowd who gather round the coach or car in the towns and hamlets, I took occasion, during my stay at Cork, to visit several of the country cottages of the working peasants in company with one of the landed proprietors. In but one out of six did I find a regular fireplace and chimney; in but one was there a window of glass, and that consisted of a single pane. The others had—with the exception of the door, and a hole in the roof, from which the smoke, after wandering at its own sweet will through the cabin, found its way out—no opening whatever for light or ventilation. But I forget—we did remark a sort of improvised window in one other. In a low, miserable hovel, belonging to a carman, we found a horse occupying full a third of the scanty room; and above his manger a small hole had been made through the mud wall, the good man having found that the health of the animal required what himself and family lived without,—air.
To the mistress of this unique habitation, whose one apartment served for kitchen, sleeping-room, stable, and hall, I said, in horrified amazement, “How is it possible you can live with that horse?” “Sure, miss, he’s no throuble,” she replied; “and it’s little room he takes, after all; for the childer can sleep on the straw under him, just, and creep between his legs, and he never harming them at all, the sensible cratur.” It is a common thing to see hens drying their feathers by the genial peat glow, and pigs enjoying the pleasures of the domestic hearth. In another cabin we found two curious old crones, living together on apparently nothing, who loaded us with blessings in the original tongue, and actually went on their knees to offer up thanksgiving for a few half-pence, which we gave as a consideration for intruding on their retirement.