I bought me an umbrella. Thenceforward I was only separated from it during sleep and meals while I remained in the British Islands. It was almost always necessary. The wretch who sold it to me, however, saw that I wore overshoes, and charged me about three Irish prices. I feel certain that the day will come when he will be fitly punished. He will emigrate to the United States sooner or later, and the hackmen or restaurateurs of New York will avenge me!
Steam is a wonderful leveller. It is destroying national costume and toning down national peculiarities. The same round hat which was worn in New York when I left is worn in Queenstown; the same fashion of winter overcoat. The up-and-down-the-gamut intonations of the Cork brogue, however, bring you to a consciousness of your true latitude and longitude. The long, hooded cloth cloaks of the peasant women have some suggestions of nationality about them. Occasionally, too, a girl of seventeen or eighteen with bare feet and short kirtle is seen. This is characteristic.
“Buy a bunch of Irish shamrocks from me, sir? Now, do, sir, if ye plase.”
We cannot refuse. We lay in a plentiful supply of the chosen leaf of bard and chief.
“Long life to you, sir, and to the purty ladies and the beautiful childer, and all the blessings in the world on ye. May ye never know what it is to want anything for them!”
The shamrocks alone were not dear; but with such a prayer added, we felt as if we were taking the poor woman's stock in trade for nothing.
As a matter of course, I expected to find Ireland rather backward [pg 413] as regards women's rights and that sort of thing. I was somewhat surprised, therefore, on entering the telegraph office, to find a telegraphist of the gentler sex. She seemed to be quite a business young lady—quick, intelligent, and polite. With the least possible display of conscious superiority, she instructed me in the mode of filling those absurd British blanks for my first British telegrams. With the condescending gentleness of an amiable “school-marm” instructing a good boy of unfortunately limited knowledge and capacity, she “posted” me in the names and location of streets in Dublin. She was industrious as well as intelligent. She had brought her knitting. During our conversation, she doubly improved the shining hour by rolling into a ball a skein of worsted which a most serious and attentive young lady of eight or nine summers held distended on her outstretched and uplifted hands.
The hotel at which we stopped was managed by women. I afterwards remarked, in my trip through the island, that the internal economy of most of the hotels in Ireland is under female direction. The post-offices and postal-telegraph offices are very generally managed by women. There are numerous institutions for the care of aged, sick, or destitute women, or for the rescue and reformation of the poor erring sisters who have been led away from the paths of purity and peace.
“I really believe, after all,” said the Lady from Idaho to me one day, in conversation on this subject, “that they take better care of their women than we do.”
We take the cars for Cork. We ride to the “beautiful city” through the loveliest bit of landscape on which the sun ever shone, or, more appositely, on which the gentle rain from heaven ever fell. It is indeed a land of loveliness and song. The good-natured guard, having remarked our overshoes doubtless, puts his face to the car-window, and enthusiastically asks: