On an invitation
To a jollification
With a parish priest
That's called ‘Father Tom.’ ”
The guard blows his whistle. We leave Passage and its satellite, Carrigaloe, behind, and with them the pleasant vision of a cheerful evening with the hospitable and large-hearted ecclesiastic of the inimitable song.
Not in this wide world is there a lovelier piece of landscape than that between Queenstown and Cork. Here the Lee is bordered by lovely lawns of the freshest green, sloping gently to the water's edge. Further on it flows between verdurous walls of lofty trees. The leaves of their drooping branches kiss the rippling current as it passes. Yonder the Castle of Blackrock frowns over its gently-flowing tide. The grass and the leaves are green with a vivid greenness that justifies all that the poets have sung about the Emerald Island. What glory in thy long, green vistas, beautiful Glanmire!
Our road is bordered on one side by the river; on the other, rich demesnes, bounded by trees, ivy-covered walls, and moss-covered rocks, from which fall miniature cascades and waves the green and graceful fern.
The landscape needs only one modest charm to make its loveliness complete. I miss the humble cottage, lowly yet lovely, where honest labor finds its comfort and repose. There are rich mansions and umbrageous groves and broad pastures, but no smoke ascends from cheerful hearths of tillers of the soil. The peasantry, whose cottages might grace these lovely glades, are building themselves new homes on the broad prairies of the West. The humble wooden sheds or the rough cabins on the brown and treeless plains, sacred to the Lares of independence and self-reliance, are far lovelier in the eyes of the lover of his kind than thy greenest glades, beautiful Glanmire!
“A bold peasantry, their country's pride,
If once destroyed, can never be supplied.”