But for the loneliness of her life here, Mrs. Hutchins tells me she would find it delightful. The country is exceedingly lovely in the summer and autumn months.
When my car came out to take me back to Athy, I found my jarvey in excellent spirits, and quite friendly even with Mr. Hutchins himself. He kept up a running fire of lively commentaries upon the residents whose estates we passed.
“Would you think now, your honour,” he said, pointing with his whip to one large mansion standing well among good trees, “that that’s the snuggest man there is about Athy? But he is; and it’s no wonder! Would you believe it, he never buys a newspaper, but he walks all the way into Athy, and goes about from the bank to the shops till he finds one, and picks it up and reads it. He’s mighty fond of the news, but he’s fonder, you see, of a penny!
“There now, your honour, just look at that house! It’s a magistrate he is that lives there; and why? Why, just to be called ‘your honour,’ and have the people tip their hats to him. Oh! he delights in that, he does. Why, you might knock a man, or put him in the water, you might, indeed, but if you came before Mr.——, and you just called him ‘your honour’ often enough, and made up to him, you’d be all right! You’ve just to go up to him with your hat in your hand, looking up at him, and to say, ‘Ah! now, your honour’“ (imitating the wheedling tone to perfection), ”and indeed you’d get anything out of him—barring a sixpence, that is, or a penny!
“Ah! he’s a snug one, too!” And with that he launched a sharp thwack of the whip at the grey mare, and we went rattling on apace.
At the very pretty station of Athy we parted the best of friends. “Wish you safe home, your honour.” The kindly railway porter, also, who had recommended Kavanagh’s Hotel, was anxious to know how I found it, and so busied himself to get me a good carriage when the train came in, that I feel bound to exempt Athy from the judgment passed by Sir James Allport’s committee against the “amenities of railway travelling in Ireland.”
DUBLIN, Saturday, March 10.—I called by appointment to-day upon Mr. Brooke, the owner of the Coolgreany estate, at his counting-house in Gardiner’s Row. It is one of the spacious old last-century houses of Dublin; the counting-room is installed with dark, old-fashioned mahogany fittings, in what once was, and might easily again be made, a drawing-room. Pictures hang on the walls, and the atmosphere of the whole place is one of courtesy and culture rather than of mere modern commerce. One of the portraits here is that of Mr. Brooke’s granduncle—a handsome, full-blooded, rather testy-looking old warrior, in the close-fitting scarlet uniform of the Prince Regent’s time.
“He ought to have been called Lord Baltimore,” said Mr. Brooke good-naturedly; “for he fought against your people for that city at Bladensburg with Ross.”
“That was the battle,” I said, “in which, according to a popular tradition in my country, the Americans took so little interest that they left the field almost as soon as it began.”
Another portrait is of a kinsman who was mur dered in the highway here in Ireland many years ago, under peculiarly atrocious circumstances, and with no sort of provocation or excuse.