“Ah, no, that is not so, sir, indeed at all! We’ve three children you see, sir, in America—two girls and a boy we have.”
“And where are they?”
“Ah, the girls they’re not in any factory at all. They’re like leddies, living out in a place they call * * in Massachusetts; and the lad, he was on a farm there. But we don’t know where he is nor his sisters any more just now. And the wife, she thinks she would like to go out to America and see the children.”
“Do you hear from them regularly?”
“Well, it’s only a few pounds they send, but they’re doing very well. Domestics they are, quite like leddies; there’s their pictures on the shelf.”
“But what would you do there?”
“Ah! we’d have lodgings, the wife says, sir. But I like the ould place myself.”
“I think you are quite right there,” I replied. “And do you get work here from the farmers as the labourers do in my country?”
“Work from the farmers, sir?” he answered, rather sharply. “What they can’t help we get, but no more! If the farmers in America is like them, it’s not I would be going there! The farmers! For the farmers, a labourer, sir, is not of the race of Adam! They think any place good enough for a labourer—any place and any food! Is the farmers that way in America?”
“Well, I don’t know that they are so very much more liberal than your farmers are,” I replied; “but I think they’d have to treat you as being of the race of Adam! But are not the farmers here, or the Guardians, obliged to build houses for the labourers? I thought there was an Act of Parliament about that?”