At Ennis, as well as everywhere else in Ireland, there were of course the regular number of swaggering-looking buckeens, and shabby-genteel idlers, to watch the arrival of the mail-coach. A poor old idiot, with his grey hair tied up in bows, and with a ribbon behind, thrust out a very fair soft hand with taper fingers, and told me, nodding his head very wistfully, that he had no father nor mother: upon which score he got a penny. Nor did the other beggars round the carriage who got none seem to grudge the poor fellow’s good fortune. I think when one poor wretch has a piece of luck, the others seem glad here: and they promise to pray for you just the same if you give as if you refuse.
The town was swarming with people; the little dark streets, which twist about in all directions, being full of cheap merchandise and its vendors. Whether there are many buyers, I can’t say. This is written opposite the market-place in Galway, and I have watched a stall a hundred times in the course of the last three hours and seen no money taken: but at every place I come to, I can’t help wondering at the numbers; it seems market-day everywhere—apples, pigs, and potatoes being sold all over the kingdom. There seem to be some good shops in those narrow streets: among others, a decent little library, where I bought, for eighteenpence, six volumes of works strictly Irish, that will serve for a half-hour’s gossip on the next rainy day.
The road hence to Gort carried us at first by some dismal, lonely-looking, reedy lakes, through a melancholy country; an open village standing here and there, with a big chapel in the midst of it, almost always unfinished in some point or other. Crossing at a bridge near a place called Tubbor, the coachman told us we were in the famous county of Galway, which all readers of novels admire in the warlike works of Maxwell and Lever; and, dismal as the country had been in Clare, I think on the northern side of the bridge it was dismaller still—the stones not only appearing in the character of hedges, but strewing over whole fields, in which sheep were browsing as well as they could.
We rode for miles through this stony, dismal district, seeing more lakes now and anon, with fellows spearing eels in the midst. Then we passed the plantations of Lord Gort’s Castle of Loughcooter, and presently came to the town which bears his name, or vice versâ. It is a regularly-built little place, with a square and street: but it looked as if it wondered how the deuce it got into the midst of such a desolate country, and seemed to bore itself there considerably. It had nothing to do, and no society.
A short time before arriving at Oranmore, one has glimpses of the sea, which comes opportunely to relieve the dulness of the land. Between Gort and that place we passed through little but the most woeful country, in the midst of which was a village, where a horse-fair was held, and where (upon the word of the coachman) all the bad horses of the country were to be seen. The man was commissioned, no doubt, to buy for his employers, for two or three merchants were on the look-out for him, and trotted out their cattle by the side of the coach. A very good, neat-looking, smart-trotting chestnut horse, of seven years old, was offered by the owner for £8; a neat brown mare for £10, and a better (as I presume) for £14; but all looked very respectable, and I have the coachman’s word for it that they were good serviceable horses. Oranmore, with an old castle in the midst of the village, woods, and park plantations round about, and the bay beyond it, has a pretty and romantic look; and the drive of about four miles thence to Galway, the most picturesque part, perhaps, of the fifty miles’ ride from Limerick. The road is tolerably wooded. You see the town itself, with its huge old church-tower, stretching along the bay, ‘backed by hills linking into the long chain of mountains which stretch across Connemara and the Joyce country.’ A suburb of cots that seems almost endless has, however, an end at last among the houses of the town: and a little fleet of a couple of hundred fishing-boats was manœuvring in the bright waters of the bay.
CHAPTER XV
GALWAY—KILROY’S HOTEL—GALWAY NIGHT’S ENTERTAINMENTS—FIRST NIGHT: AN EVENING WITH CAPTAIN FREENY
WHEN it is stated that, throughout the town of Galway, you cannot get a cigar which costs more than twopence, Londoners may imagine the strangeness and remoteness of the place. The rain poured down for two days after our arrival at Kilroy’s Hotel. An umbrella under such circumstances is a poor resource: self-contemplation is far more amusing, especially smoking, and a game at cards, if any one will be so good as to play.
But there was no one in the hotel coffee-room who was inclined for the sport. The company there, on the day of our arrival, consisted of two coach passengers,—a Frenchman who came from Sligo, and ordered mutton-chops and fraid potatoes for dinner by himself, a turbot which cost two shillings, and in Billingsgate would have been worth a guinea; and a couple of native or inhabitant bachelors who frequented the table d’hôte.
By the way, besides these there were at dinner two turkeys (so that Mr. Kilroy’s two-shilling ordinary was by no means ill supplied); and, as a stranger, I had the honour of carving these animals, which were dispensed in rather a singular way. There are, as it is generally known, to two turkeys four wings. Of the four passengers, one ate no turkey, one had a pinion, another the remaining part of the wing, and the fourth gentleman took the other three wings for his share. Does everybody in Galway eat three wings when there are two turkeys for dinner? One has heard wonders of the country,—the dashing, daring, duelling, desperate, rollicking, whisky-drinking people: but this wonder beats all. When I asked the Galway turkiphagus (there is no other word, for turkey was invented long after Greece) ‘if he would take a third wing?’ with a peculiar satiric accent on the words third wing, which cannot be expressed in writing, but which the occasion fully merited, I thought perhaps that, following the custom of the country where everybody, according to Maxwell and Lever, challenges everybody else,—I thought the Galwagian would call me out; but no such thing. He only said, ‘If you plase, sir,’ in the blandest way in the world; and gobbled up the limb in a twinkling.
As an encouragement, too, for persons meditating that important change of condition, the gentleman was a teetotaller: he took but one glass of water to that intolerable deal of bubblyjock. Galway must be very much changed since the days when Maxwell and Lever knew it. Three turkey-wings and a glass of water! But the man cannot be the representative of a class, that is clear: it is physically and arithmetically impossible. They can’t all eat three wings of two turkeys at dinner: the turkeys could not stand it, let alone the men. These wings must have been ‘non usitatæ (nec tenues) pennæ.’ But no more of these flights; let us come to sober realities.