Nor does the town itself, as one enters it, belie, as many other Irish towns do, its first flourishing look. It is not splendid, but comfortable; a brisk movement in the streets; good downright shops, without particularly grand titles; few beggars. Nor have the common people, as they address you, that eager smile,—that manner of compound fawning and swaggering, which an Englishman finds in the townspeople of the west and south. As in the North of England, too, when compared with other districts, the people are greatly more familiar, though by no means disrespectful to the stranger.
On the other hand, after such a commerce as a traveller has with the race of waiters, postboys, porters, and the like (and it may be that the vast race of postboys, etc., whom I did not see in the north, are quite unlike those unlucky specimens with whom I came in contact), I was struck by their excessive greediness after the traveller’s gratuities, and their fierce dissatisfaction if not sufficiently rewarded. To the gentleman who brushed my clothes at the comfortable hotel at Belfast, and carried my bags to the coach, I tendered the sum of two shillings, which seemed to me quite a sufficient reward for his services: he battled and bawled with me for more, and got it too; for a street-dispute with a porter calls together a number of delighted bystanders, whose remarks and company are by no means agreeable to a solitary gentleman. Then, again, was the famous case of Boots of Ballycastle, which, being upon the subject, I may as well mention here: Boots of Ballycastle, that romantic little village near the Giant’s Causeway, had cleaned a pair of shoes for me certainly, but declined either to brush my clothes, or to carry down my two carpet-bags to the car; leaving me to perform those offices for myself, which I did: and indeed they were not very difficult. But immediately I was seated on the car, Mr. Boots stepped forward, and wrapped a mackintosh very considerately round me, and begged me at the same time to ‘remember him.’
There was an old beggar-woman standing by, to whom I had a desire to present a penny: and having no coin of that value, I begged Mr. Boots, out of sixpence which I tendered to him, to subtract a penny, and present it to the old lady in question. Mr. Boots took the money, looked at me, and his countenance, not naturally good-humoured, assumed an expression of the most indignant contempt and hatred as he said, ‘I’m thinking I’ve no call to give my money away. Sixpence is my right for what I’ve done.’
‘Sir,’ says I, ‘you must remember that you did but black one pair of shoes, and that you blacked them very badly too.’
‘Sixpence is my right,’ says Boots; ‘a gentleman would give me sixpence!’ and, though I represented to him that a pair of shoes might be blacked in a minute—that fivepence a minute was not usual wages in the country—that many gentlemen, half-pay officers, briefless barristers, unfortunate literary gentlemen, would gladly black twelve pairs of shoes per diem if rewarded with five shillings for so doing, there was no means of convincing Mr. Boots. I then demanded back the sixpence, which proposal, however, he declined, saying, after a struggle, he would give the money, but a gentleman would have given sixpence; and so left me with furious rage and contempt.
As for the city of Derry, a carman who drove me one mile out to dinner at a gentleman’s house, where he himself was provided with a comfortable meal, was dissatisfied with eighteenpence, vowing that a ‘dinner job’ was always paid half-a-crown, and not only asserted this, but continued to assert it for a quarter of an hour with the most noble though unsuccessful perseverance. A second car-boy, to whom I gave a shilling for a drive of two miles altogether, attacked me because I gave the other boy eighteenpence; and the porter who brought my bags fifty yards from the coach, entertained me with a dialogue that lasted at least a couple of minutes, and said, ‘I should have had sixpence for carrying one of ‘em.’
For the car which carried me two miles the landlord of the inn made me pay the sum of five shillings. He is a godly landlord, has Bibles in the coffee-room, the drawing-room, and every bedroom in the house, with this inscription—
UT MIGRATURUS HABITA
THE TRAVELLER’S TRUE REFUGE
Jones’s Hotel, Londonderry
This pious double or triple entendre, the reader will, no doubt, admire—the first simile establishing the resemblance between this life and an inn; the second allegory showing that the inn and the Bible are both the traveller’s refuge.
In life we are in death—the hotel in question is about as gay as a family vault: a severe figure of a landlord, in seedy black, is occasionally seen in the dark passages or on the creaking old stairs of the black inn. He does not bow to you—very few landlords in Ireland condescend to acknowledge their guests—he only warns you—a silent solemn gentleman who looks to be something between a clergyman and a sexton—‘ut migraturus habita!’—the ‘migraturus’ was a vast comfort in the clause.