“No.”
“Any firearms?”
“No, sir,” I answer, and inwardly bless my stars that my better and more sensible half has left behind, for lack of room, the “six-shooter” which I carried for ten years in the free land of the West. What a piece of luck! I have been assured by Irish friends that had I brought that unhappy “six-shooter” with me, I should most undoubtedly have been arrested for some undefined bloody intentions with regard to that most susceptible animal, the lion of Great Britain. The lion would have been very much mistaken; for never were the Irish shores visited by any one whose heart was more full of peace and good-will.
Ireland is not a safe place for any one who has a trans-Atlantic odor about him during a Fenian paroxysm. The possession of a pocket derringer is sufficient evidence of belligerent intentions. New-York-made boots are objects of suspicion, and in times of excitement have been the cause of trouble to the wearer. As harmless and commercial an article as a wooden nutmeg, carried merely as a patriotic souvenir, may entail considerable annoyance on its possessor, and perhaps necessitate the good offices of his consul to enable him to pursue his tourist path of pleasure or business in peace. In such periods as anti-Fenian frenzy, English ports are the safest and pleasantest; for in Ireland, then, the lion is rampant, roaring and seeking whom he may devour. It is better to keep away from his super-serviceable retainers in Ireland.
But the political horizon is unclouded. The bloody-minded revolutionists of the pen and inkstand are quiescent for the nonce. We find the officials kind and polite. They opened only one of our trunks. They gave its contents merely a cursory inspection, and chalked cabalistic characters on all our boxes, portmanteaus, satchels, etc. They fished for no fee, nor was any offered them.
It is nearly midnight when we leave the tug. We step ashore. After a quarter of a century of absence, my foot is upon my native heath. My name is not MacGregor, dear reader, nor is it Micawber.
I do not think people feel much at the moment that anything happens [pg 410] to them. It is either before or after; in anticipation or retrospection. In describing their sensations, they tell us what they suppose they are going to feel, or what they think they ought to have felt. I have stood bare-headed by the grave of Washington at Mount Vernon. I believe the man and his work to be among the greatest that ever blest the world. What did I feel? A kind of sorrowful, reverential, awe-struck mental numbness; then a sad yet selfish pity for my kind, who, however good and great they be, e'en to this favor must they come at last. I could not have distinctly shaped a thought or given expression to any of the ideas which a visit to the grave of Washington might be supposed to suggest to a conventionally susceptible imagination. Yet my eyes were full of tears. In the evening, however, in a comfortable room at Willard's, in an easy-chair by a cheerful fire, in the pleasant ease of slippers and cigars, with a quire of thick, white, unglazed letter-paper before me, any kind of steel pen (I hate a gold pen for literary work; it has a counting-house suggestiveness that seems to disagree with the muses), with mayhap a modicum of vin chaud at my elbow, what pages of “Thoughts suggested by a visit to the grave of Washington” I could have “knocked off”! But unluckily Jones rushed in with the sad news that poor Thompson had been killed on the other side of the river, and drove all the intended “Thoughts” out of my head. There is no real present. We have only the past and the future.
The debarkation of a number of ladies, children, trunks, boxes, and carpet-bags is not generative of the softer emotions. The night is damp and chilly. It has reached the wee sma' hours. There is no omnibus or hack to take us to the hotel. Some night-birds, with low, flat caps and Corkonian accents, offer to carry our luggage and show us the way to the hotel. It is “only a step or two.” The cortége sets out for the hotel. Corkonian youngsters—who ought to have been in their beds, if they had any beds to go to—come suddenly out of the darkness, and ask, with wonderful chromatic elocution, the privilege of carrying our satchels. It is useless to tell them we do not need their assistance. They will not be denied. They keep up their chromatics until we succumb. Well, it is sixpence each for them—a treble, or American, gratuity. An American, native or adopted, to whom, especially if he have lived in the West, “a quarter” seems the lowest gratuity that he can offer to the negro who blacks his boots in a sleeping-car, feels an impulse of lavishness on touching Irish ground. He “feels good,” and wishes to make all around him partake of the feeling. Half a dollar seems the least that he can offer the waiter at the hotel with justice to his own dignity and that of the country he has the honor to represent. He is not always so generous when he returns at the end of his tour, and the gratuity system of Britain has disgusted him and helped to deplete his purse. Then he comes down to the smallest silver coin in his portemonnaie. He cannot offer coppers, and never gets as low as the Englishman's “tuppence.”
The English and the Irish in Ireland inveigh bitterly against the American propensity to give extravagant douceurs. They say that Americans are spoiling their waiters, porters, servants, etc. They [pg 411] call this liberality snobbishness, desire to display! The fact is, it is partly a matter of habit, partly a want of knowledge of the comparative values of “tips” at home and abroad. What American from the further side of the Mississippi expects to get anything for a penny? Add to this, what I before remarked, that the American in Ireland “feels good,” and wants to scatter around all the good he can.
Well! here we are at the hotel. A somewhat stupefied porter receives us. He has to see somebody before he can inform us as to the probability of entertainment. He has not indicated any room where the ladies and children can sit and take the night-chill off while we await the result of his conference with Mr. or Mrs. Boniface. We remain standing in the entry, our carpet-bags and wraps in our hands. At length the comatose porter returns, and says that bed-rooms are ready for us!