One Irish Summer

by William Eleroy Curtis

Mr. Croker has an even dozen horses and colts in training, and he showed us some yearlings of great promise. His two-year-olds and three-year-olds are all entered for races in Ireland, and those that do well will be sent over to England. In 1907 his horses won forty races in both countries, and his stable has altogether about three hundred to its credit since he came to Ireland.

The horse show at Dublin in August is the greatest event in Ireland, and draws from the entire kingdom as well as from the Continent, thousands of horse breeders and horse owners and fashionable people. It is probably the most brilliant and important horse show in the world.

There are three kinds of jaunting cars,—“outside cars,” in which the passengers sit back to back with their feet on shelves over the wheels; “inside cars,” in which they sit face to face with their feet in the middle, and “single cars,” which have one seat accommodating two persons facing the horse. The latter are the most comfortable of all, but give the passengers a good shaking up, which we are told is excellent for the liver.

It is a curious fact that the jaunting car, although it is distinctively Irish, and would not be tolerated in any other country, was invented and introduced by an Italian, Charles Bianconi, a native of Milan, who arrived in Ireland about the year 1800 and set up at Clonmel as an artist and picture dealer. Being struck by the absence of vehicles in the country, for everybody went on horseback in those days, he built a conveyance of his own design which immediately became popular and was imitated by every one who had the means to build or buy a box and a pair of wheels.

Only in Dublin can you hire a covered carriage—four-wheelers or “growlers,” as they are called in London; but in Waterford, Cork, and Limerick are “covered cars,” which are without doubt the most uncomfortable vehicles that anybody ever rode in, unless it be a Chinese cart. They are “inside cars,” with a hood of canvas or leather over them, supported by an iron frame or hickory bows. Imagine a large, square box with one end knocked out of it, and replaced by a step or two for the passengers to enter; two seats, one on either side, upon which the passengers sit vis-a-vis, clinging to straps suspended from the roof. There are no windows, no place for ventilation except the open back, which is covered with a curtain that may be raised or not, according to the state of the weather.

Going to Market

Two things which everybody can commend in Ireland are the horses and the donkeys—the style, strength, beauty, and speed of the one and the uncomplaining endurance of the other. An Irish horse never gets tired, is never lazy, and never vicious—at least, that is what his breeders and owners say of him, and, of course, the Irish hunters are the best in the world. But the Irish donkey, who does the humble and insignificant traffic, who hauls the vegetables to market and does the teaming for the small farmers, is an object of universal admiration. Not for his beauty, of course, but for those higher qualities that make up character, for his strength of purpose, his untiring industry, his patient fidelity. They are the mainstay of the Irish poor, and, although the object of ridicule and wit, I think the people appreciate them, because they treat them so much better than the Italians and Spaniards and the peons of the Spanish-American republics of America.

“Go back to your brother!” said a street urchin the other day to a costermonger who left his donkey by the roadside for a few moments. “Go back to your brother!” said the chauffeur of our automobile to a woman who was driving a donkey cart and came across to inspect our machine. “Go back to your brother!” said a policeman to a young boy who was driving a donkey cart and had jumped off his ordinary seat upon the whiffletree to resent the attack of some street urchin. And when I asked the policeman about the use of that phrase, which one hears continually, he explained that it was common all over Ireland for a donkey driver to call his beast “brother,” and it deserves that name for its fidelity if for nothing more.