CHAPTER XXV.IRELAND.

THE TELL CATASTROPHE.

THE CAREER OF SAM.

“But it turned out pretty well, after all. The smart man is he who turns wat to others wood be a misfortoon to account. I hed the scalp tanned with the hair outside, and ez soon ez Sam’s bald head healed up I exhibited him in a blue roundabout, with brass buttons—I bought the soot cheap uv a bellboy at a hotel in Cincinnati—ez the son uv the Rev. Melchizadek Smith, a missionary for thirty years among the Injuns, who wuz scalped at the time his father wuz barbariously killed, and I hed a life uv the Rev. Smith writ, and an account of the massacre, and Sam sold it after he hed bin exhibited. It did very well till he got too big for that biznis.”

“But Sam is doin’ very well. He is now an end man in a minstrel show, and he does the Lancashire clog, and does mighty well in the wench biznis, and he hez a partner in the brother biznis, the De Montmorencies, I beleeve they wuz, the last time I heerd uv ’em. He will git on—he hez a great deal uv talent and kin turn his hand to almost anything.”

ZOOLOGICAL ROOM—BRITISH MUSEUM.

“ ’Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen,They’re hanging men and women there for the wearin’ of the green.”

From France the gay, France the prosperous, France the delightful, to Ireland the sad, Ireland the poor, Ireland the oppressed, is a tremendous jump. Contrasts are necessary, and my readers are going to have all they want of them.

CORK HARBOR.

CORK.

Cork is a lovely city; that is, it would be a lovely city were it a city at all. Nature intended Cork for a great city, but man stepped in and thwarted Nature. It is situated on the most magnificent site for a city there is in all Europe. Awonderfully beautiful river, with water enough to float any vessel, flows through it; and at the mouth of that river, twelve miles below, is one of the great harbors of the world. Queenstown—I wonder that any Irishman ever consented to call it Queenstown—is the nearest port to the great western hemisphere, and Cork should be the center of all the trade from America.

It is twenty-four hours nearer New York than Liverpool, and should be the final landing-place of the American lines, instead of being simply a point to be touched.

QUEENSTOWN.

Cork is a sleepy city of perhaps seventy thousand population, made up of the handsomest men and most beautiful women and children on the face of the globe. You shall see more feminine beauty on the streets of Cork in an hour than you can anywhere else in a week. Homely women there are none—beautiful women are so plenty that it really becomes monotonous. One rather gets to wishing that he could see an occasional pair of English feet, for the sake of variety.

The city itself is beautiful, as are all the cities of Ireland; but it is a sad city, as are all the cities of Ireland. It is not prosperous, and cannot be, for it is under English domination, and England will not permit prosperity in Ireland. It is only the attachment which an Irishman has for his own countrythat makes anybody stay there. With every natural advantage, with every facility for manufacturing, for trade and commerce, with the best harbor in the world, and the nearest point for American trade, it has no manufactures to speak of, and no trade whatever. Its population has decreased thirty thousand within fifteen years, and its trade is slowly but surely dwindling to nothingness.

The river Lea is a wonderfully beautiful stream, and Cork, which occupies both sides of it, is a wonderfully beautiful city, and would be an enjoyable city but for the feeling of sadness that comes to an American the moment he sees the empty warehouses, the empty dwellings, and the signs of decay that are everywhere.

There are churches everywhere, and churches with a history. Here is the church of Shandon, of whose chimes Father Prout wrote:

“The bells of ShandonThat sound so grand onThe pleasant waters of the river Lea.”

Here is climate, soil, situation—everything to make a great controlling city; here are a people with industry, intelligence, brains, and all the requisites to make a great controlling city; but, despite all these points in its favor, Cork has decreased year by year, and is to-day absolutely nothing. The city has lost population every year; its business is leaving it, its warehouses are empty, its streets are deserted, its quays are silent—it is nothing.

What is the reason for this? It is all summed up in one word—landlordism. There is no man in the world, not excepting the Frenchman, who will work longer or harder than the Irishman. There is no race of men who are better merchants or more enterprising dealers, and there is no reason, but one, why Cork should not be one of the largest and richest cities of the world. That reason is, English ownership of Irish soil.

Irish landlordism is condensed villainy. It is the very top and summit of oppression, cruelty, brutality and terror.

It was conceived in lust and greed, born of fraud, and perpetuated by force.

A MILD EXPRESSION OF OPINION.

It does not recognize manhood, womanhood or childhood. Its cold hand is upon every cradle in Ireland. Its victims are the five millions of people in Ireland who cannot get away, and the instruments used to hold them are bayonets and ball cartridges.

It is a ghoul that would invade grave-yards were there any profit to be gotten out of grave-yards. It is the coldest-blooded, cruelest infamy that the world has ever seen, and that any race of people was ever fated to groan under.

Irish landlordism is legal brigandage—it is an organized hell.

Wesley said that African slavery was the sum of all villainies. Irish landlordism comprises all the villainies that the devil ever invented, with African slavery thrown in. Irish landlordism makes African slavery a virtue by comparison. For when a negro slave got too old to work, he was given some place in which to live, and sufficient food to keep him in some sort of life, and clothes enough to shield him from the elements.

The Irish tenant, when he becomes old and cannot work, is thrown out upon the roadside, with his wife and his children, to die and rot. He has created lands with his own hands, which he is not allowed to occupy; he has grown crops which he is not allowed to eat; he has labored as no other man in the world has labored, without being permitted to enjoy the fruits of his labor. The virtue of his wife and daughter are in the keeping of the villain, who by virtue of bayonets, controls his land. In short, to sum it all up in one word, the Irishman is a serf, a slave.

In a country that makes a boast of its freedom, he is the suffering victim of men who claim to be Christians; he is the robbed, outraged sufferer of a few men who are as unfeeling as the bayonets that keep him down, as merciless and cruel as tigers.

From the above feeble utterances my readers will, I hope, get the idea that I do not like Irish landlordism. I hope some day to get sufficient command of words to make my meaning apparent. I really would like to make it understood just how I feel about it.

To see Ireland you must not do as the regular tourist always does, follow the regular routes of tourists’ travel. You may go all over Ireland, in one way, and you will not see a particle of suffering, or any discontent. At Glengariff, for instance, the most charming spot on the earth, you are lodged in as fine a hotel as there is anywhere; the people are all well dressed and well fed, and the visitor wonders why there should be any discontent.

This is a part of the English Government’s policy. On these lines of travel, which the tourist for pleasure always takes, the misery is kept out of sight, and the mouths of the people who serve you are sealed. The American lady traveling through that country don’t like to see naked women and squalid poverty, for it would make her uncomfortable. None of it is shown her, and she wonders at the discontent of the Irish.

But just take a boat at Glengariff, leave the splendid hotel, and be rowed two miles across the bay, and you begin to see Ireland, the real Ireland. You then know why Ireland is agitated; you then see the real reason why an Englishman is hated with an intensity that would find expression in a rifle shot, if rifles were permitted to be owned and used.

We took a train for Fermoy, a distance of perhaps fifty miles from Cork. In Fermoy, a tolerably prosperous village for Ireland, the women did not only have no shoes or stockings, but they had scarcely anything else to wear.

“This is nothing,” said the wise Mr. Redpath, who was with us; “these people are fairly prosperous—for Ireland. I shall show you something worth while before night.”

It puzzled me somewhat to understand how anybody could be worse off than to be walking in cold mud without any protection whatever for the feet, but I found it at Mitchellstown, at the foot of the Galtee mountains.

THE JAUNTING CAR.

The Irish jaunting-car, being the most inconvenient and detestable vehicle on earth, deserves a description. It should be known in order to be avoided. A jaunting-car is simply a two-wheeled vehicle with the body that supports the seat reversed. Instead of sitting so as to look forward, you are on the side; the seat runs the wrong way—which is characteristic of almost everything in Ireland. The driver sits lookingtoward the horse, the passengers sit backing each other, and the concern is so balanced that you must hold on a rail with a death-grip, or be flung off upon the road by every jolt. As detestable as it is, it is the national Irish vehicle, and you ride on the car, or go afoot.

AN IRISH WOMAN AND HER DAUGHTER ON THE ROAD TO CHURCH.

On one of these atrocious conveyances, we left Mitchellstown at nine o’clock in the morning, in a soaking rain-storm,the cold, misty drizzle going through our heavy overcoats, and almost penetrating the very marrow. The road wound along past well cultivated fields, over picturesque streams, now up gentle declivities that gave us, or would have given us had the day been clear and fine, an admirable view of the valley that lay spread at the foot of the Galtee Mountains. But on that day the picture was not a cheering one. The sun refused to shine, the rain was cold, and the whole prospect was bleak and desolate. Then our driver was a loquacious fellow, who had at his tongue’s end hundreds of instances of the oppression of landlords and the terrible sufferings of the poor, evicted tenants. He talked fast, and, his whole heart being in the subject, he talked well, oftentimes emphasizing his stories by pointing to bare-footed, bare-legged and bare-headed women, who went trudging along the cold, wet road, with no protection from the frightful inclemency of the weather but a light shawl thrown over the ragged dress that scarcely covered their bodies. These women, whom he pointed out as evicted tenants, were not the rough, degraded-looking beggars that are commonly supposed to overrun Ireland, and make the tourist’s life one of continual annoyance. They were bright, intelligent and handsome, and, notwithstanding the horrors of their situation, comparatively cheerful. But it was an unnatural cheerfulness, for it was noticeable that there were lines about the mouth and around the eyes that told only too plainly their story of want and suffering.

Even with these living evidences, we could hardly believe the stories of cruelties committed by the landlords and their agents, which our driver kept pouring into our ears. We could not realize that they could be true. They seemed so absolutely barbarous that we utterly refused to accept them, and did not, till, having gone about nine miles from Mitchellstown, we stopped at a little roadside cabin, as they called it, although we would have more properly denominated it a hovel.

MR. DUGGAN’S FAMILY.

At the invitation of our guide we alighted, shook the rain off from our great coats, and entered the place to inquire for Michael Duggan, who worked the little holding back of it. He was not at home, but his wife, a comely, buxom woman of about forty years, asked us to be seated, at the same timeoffering a small stool on which one of the girls of the family had been sitting near the fire, taking care of an infant.

While our guide was inquiring for Mr. Duggan, we made an inspection of the house, where a man, his wife and seven children lived. There was the one principal room in which we were standing, which was about ten by twelve feet, and eight feet high. There was no floor, except the original earth. There was only one opening for a window, and that had never known a pane of glass. In one end of the room there was a dingy, smoky fireplace, around which were huddled three or four children, scantily dressed in loose cotton slips that came to just below the knee. At the other end of the room a brood of chickens disported themselves in a pile of furze, while every few minutes a huge porker would push his nose in at the open door, only to be driven away by one of the children.

A COUNTY CORK CABIN.

The family was very interesting. The mother was tall, well formed, and of an exceedingly pleasant appearance, while the children, shy at the sight of so many strangers, were sturdy, healthful andclean. They were bright and intelligent, and under any other circumstances and mode of life would grow up to be eminently representative citizens.

On the return of Mr. Duggan from the fields, we went with him up the Galtee Mountains, he explaining on the waythat he was very comfortably fixed compared with his neighbors. He said that his grandfather had taken the little holding he occupied, when it was full of stones and rocks, and was next to worthless. He paid a rent of three shillings an acre for it. During his lifetime the land was partially reclaimed, the rocks and boulders were taken out of a part of one field, and the rent was advanced to seven shillings. His father further improved it and raised some little crops, and the rent went up to twenty shillings. When the present tenant succeeded to it, it was in comparatively good shape, and with the improvements he had made, building the house, or rather hovel, the value of the land had increased enough in the mind of the landlord to justify him in placing the rent at two pounds.

INTERIOR OF A BETTER CLASS CABIN, COUNTY CORK.

THE ALTERNATIVE.

That tract of land in America, if one were to go to the few districts where such abominably bad land can be found, wouldbe thought extremely high if it were sold at a dollar, or four shillings an acre.

“Well, how in the world can you raise enough on such a holding to pay such an exorbitant rent?”

ROYAL IRISH CONSTABULARY.

“I can’t do it. I’ve tried my best, but it is absolutely impossible.”

“Suppose you don’t pay the rent, then what?”

“I’ll be thrown out in the road, with my family and the little furniture we have gotten together.”

“In case you refuse to be thrown out of the house you have built, and off the land you and your fathers before you made from utterly worthless fields of rocks?”

“Then those fellows would come down upon me.”

As he spoke he pointed to a flying squadron of a hundred and fifty men, who were riding back to Mitchellstown after having evicted a number of tenants who had been unable to pay the back rent. They were a fine looking body of men, well mounted and well armed, each one carrying a loaded carbine, while at his side was dangling a sword bayonet.

INTERIOR OF A CABIN IN KILLALEEN.

But our business in hand was not speculating upon results so much as to see the actual conditions that led to and still sustains the agitation. So we plodded on, through the drenching rain that was coming down in torrents, up the bleak and desolate hill side.

Along the side of the road were high stone fences, from four to seven feet wide at the top, rather good fences for so poor a country.

“Why, you see,” said Mr. Duggan in reply to an inquiry as to how they found time to make such solid substantial fences, “those stones were every one taken from that field there, and having no other place to put them we made a fence, and our rent was raised on us for doing it, worse the luck.”

ANOTHER CABIN.

We looked into the field whence these stones were taken. It was as uninviting a piece of ground as can be imagined, still full of huge boulders, rocks, weeds and the never-dying heather. It was not capable of supporting a sparrow, yet for the slight improvement that had been made, the rent had been raised. Great inducement that for a man to work!

Seeing a little low, thatched cabin just off the road, we asked in all simplicity, if it had any history, for by this time it was beginning to dawn upon us that almost everything in that vicinity had some story connected with it. But we were totally unprepared for the reply.

A QUIVER FULL.

“No, there’s no history about it. It is simply the dwelling place of a family of people who are daily expecting to be evicted because they can’t pay the rent, the father having been unable, through sickness, to work all of the season.”

The idea that human beings, made in God’s image, having the power to think, to reason and to act, could live, even exist, in such a hovel as that was so incredible that we insisted upon going over and seeing how it was done.

Wading through mud and slush coming over our shoe-tops, we bent our heads and entered. The room, if so it could, by a stretch of the imagination, be called, was so low that we could not stand erect. The cold bare earth that constituted the floorwas damp and slippery as the rain came trickling down through the broken thatch and formed little pools on the ground. Near a suggestion of a fire, were huddled a woman and four children, the eldest not more than eight years of age. As we entered they all arose. We were horrified to see that they were as usual without stockings or shoes, and their clothing was so torn and ragged that it afforded no warmth whatever. The mother and her little girls were blue with cold. Their features were pinched with hunger. Their whole appearance indicated the want and suffering they had been patiently enduring for years.

Over in one corner of the room was what they called a bed. It consisted of four posts driven into the ground. On stringers were laid a few rough boards; on these boards were dried leaves and heather, covered by a few old potato sacks. There was where this family of six persons slept. There was no window in the house, the only light and ventilation being furnished by the door and the cracks in the thatched roof.

It was too horrible and we went out again into the rain—there we could at least get a breath of fresh air. We asked our guide how these people managed to keep the breath of life in them. He said they lived as their neighbors did, on potatoes and “stirabout.”

“What is ‘stirabout'?”

“It is a sort of a mush made of Indian meal and skimmed milk. They have that occasionally, for a little luxury, or when the potatoes are so scarce that they think they must husband them.”

“You don’t mean to say that these people actually live on that fare? that they have nothing else? They at least have meat with their potatoes?”

“God bless you, sir,” and the honest man’s eyes filled with tears, “they never know the taste of meat. There has not been a bit of meat in my house since last Christmas, when we were fortunate enough to get a bit of pig’s head. But up here they don’t even have that.”

A TERRIBLE SEVEN HOURS.

Surely this must have been an exceptional case. It was impossible that even in that country there could be more than one or two instances of such utter and abject woe and misery.

But Mr. Duggan told us to the contrary. He said that the house we had just left was only a fair sample of what was to be seen all over the Galtee Mountains. To be convinced, we trudged painfully through the rain for seven long hours.

We toiled through fields that in America would not be accepted as a gift. Here, if the exorbitant rent charged for them could not be paid, the holders were evicted. We went through roads so wretchedly bad that teams could not travel over them. Yet taxes had to be paid by those who had holdings on either side. We saw fields that had been reclaimed from the original state, had been made productive, and had been the cause of the eviction of the holder because he could not pay the rent which the improvements brought upon him. He had been thrown off the land and it was rapidly going to waste again. Large patches of heather, which is worse than the American farmer’s bane, the Canada thistle, were growing over it, choking all other forms of vegetation. It would only take another season to make the land so worthless that three years of hard work would be required to put it back to the condition it was in when the holder had been compelled to leave it, after having devoted the best years of his life to reclaiming and making it productive.

After seven hours of such sights as these, which cannot be described, we were wet, weary and mad. We had seen enough for one day, and were ready to go back. All during the long drive to Mitchellstown not a word was said. The subject was too terrible to discuss.

THEvillage of Bantry, in County Cork, some forty miles from Cork, is owned and controlled by My Lord Bantry, who is, or, at least, ought to be, one of the richest men in Ireland. Whether he is or not depends entirely upon how expensively he lives in Paris, and how much extravagance he commits there and in London. He certainly screws enough money out of the unfortunates born upon the land stolen from them by English Kings and given to him, to make him a richer man than Rothschild, if he has taken care of it. But I don’t suppose he has. Probably the magnificent estate, robbed from the people, is mortgaged to its full value, and he supports himself by keeping his so-called tenants down to a point, in food, shelter, and clothes, that a Camanche Indian would turn up his nose at. Indeed, were the most degraded Piute compelled to accept life on the terms that My Lord Bantry imposes upon the men he robs, he would paint his face, sing his death song, go out and kill somebody, and die with great pleasure.

A STREET IN AN IRISH VILLAGE.

BANTRY VILLAGE.

Bantry is a pleasant village; that is, some of its streets are pleasant, and it has the most beautiful bay on the coast. Sailing across the most lovely body of water I have ever seen, is the famous watering place, Glengariff, which is the most delicious spot of land in the world. And Bantry itself has much in its favor, all marred by the abject poverty of nine-tenths of its inhabitants.

Leaving the main street, which is, like all the streets of Irish villages, made up of small stores, or shops, as they are called, you walk up a rather steep hill, pass through a crooked street, and you find yourself in the midst of the regulation Irish cabins.

BLARNEY CASTLE.

Miserable structures of stones piled one upon the other, not even daubed with plaster, with no windows, as a rule, though the more pretentious ones have a single pane of glass in the wall somewhere. However, as that pane is almost invariably broken, its principal use is the extra ventilation it affords.

The cabin is the same size as those on farms, say from ten to twelve feet wide by fifteen or sixteen in length. In the country, however, they do have the space above, to the thatched roof, but land is more valuable in the villages, and My Lord Bantry’s expenses in London and Paris are enormous.He must get more money out of the villagers, and he makes two stories out of the wretched hovel, and by crowding in two families makes double rent. The first floor is not above five feet six inches in height, and the upper is a good foot shorter. In neither floor can an ordinary man stand upright.

We went up the miserable stairs in one of them, and gained the still more miserable den above. It was more like a coffin than a room, and the idea of a coffin was brought forcibly to the mind as you glanced at the wretched occupants. On a miserable bed of dried leaves, covered with potato sacks on the one side, was the emaciated form of a man dying of starvation and consumption. He had about forty-eight hours of life in him. Upon my word I felt happy to see he was so near death. For having an excellent reputation, having always been a good man, he is certain to go, after death, where there would not be the slightest possible chance of meeting My Lord Bantry or his agent. In the other corner was a flat stone, upon which a consumptive fire of peat was burning, the smoke filling the room. Huddled around this fire were five children, under the watchful eye of a very comely woman. The children were barefooted and stockingless, and clad in the most deplorable rags, while the mother, also barefooted, was clothed in the regular cotton slip, without a particle of underclothing of any kind or description. And into that garret, poor as it was, came other women, not clothed sufficiently to be decent, to boil their potatoes at the wretched fire. They have a practice of exchanging fires in this way, that none shall be wasted.

“What do you pay for this apartment?”

“Ten-pence a week, sor!”

“Are you in arrears for rent?”

“Yis sor. He (pointing to her husband) has been sick, sor, for months, sor, and cud not worruk.”

“What will you do if he dies?”

“We shall be put out, sor.”

This with no burst of anguish, with no special tone of anger or manifestation of emotion. To be “put out” is the common lot of the Irish laborer, and Irish wife, and they expect it.

HOW MY LORD BANTRY LIVES.

And within a mile of that wretched spot, of that dying man and starving children, My Lord Bantry has a most beautiful castle, luxurious furniture, filled with pampered flunkies, his stable crowded with the most wonderful horses, and his table groaning under the weight of the luxuries of every clime.

FREE SPEECH IN IRELAND—INTERDICTING A LAND LEAGUE MEETING.

Surely, not for ten pence a week will he tear this woman from the side of her dead husband, and throw her, with her helpless children, out into the cold and wet street?

Yes, but he will, though!

For this family is but one of many thousands on the land which a bad King stole from the people who owned it. Were this the only case he might relent; but should he do it in this case he would have to do it for others, and ten pence a week from thousands aggregates a very large sum, and My Lord Bantry’s expenses are very high, for it costs money to run a castle, and there is his house in London, his house in Paris, and his house in Rome, and his houses the Lord knows where; and then his yacht is rather expensive, as his officers and men must be paid, to say nothing of the larder and wines necessary to entertain his friends; and then there is the terrible expense of entertaining his friends from London during the shooting season, and occasional losses at play, and all that.

Clearly, the Widow Flanagan must either pay her rent or be pitched out into the street to make room for some other widow who can pay, for a while at least, and when she can’t pay there are others who can.

It is needless to add that there is in Bantry Bay a splendid English gunboat armed as in time of war, with burnished guns, with bombs of all sort of explosive power, rifled guns, which would knock poor Bantry into a cocked hat in ten minutes, with fine looking marines, armed to the teeth, which, with the military on shore, would make it very warm for the widow Flanagan and her friends, should they presume to interfere with My Lord’s land agent, and the bailiffs and the soldiers behind them. The widow has nothing to do but to bow her head and submit, and pray that some relief may come to her from somewhere. But where is it to come from? Not from My Lord, for, as I said, he has his private expenses to meet; not from his agent, for he was selected for his especial fondness for pitching women and children into the street; not from England, for England looks upon every country it has anything to do with as either to be plundered or traded with; not from the peasantry about them, for they are in the same boat with the widow.

A LITTLE PATHOS.

What becomes of her finally, I don’t know. I am altogether too soft-hearted to stay any length of time where such things are to be seen every hour.

IN A BOG VILLAGE.

A pathetic little scene took place in the widow’s loft, which illustrates something of Irish character. As I said the husband and father was lying upon his wretched pallet, dying of consumption. The youngest but one of the children was the most beautiful child I have ever seen, a sweet little fairy, with long curly, blonde hair and black eyes, built from the ground up, and with a face that a painter would walk miles to sketch. She was a delicious little dream, a dainty bit of humanity. True, she had nothing but rags upon her delightful little figure, and true it was that her sweet little face was smeared with dirt, and her little hands were as grimy as grimy could be, and her little shapely bare legs were very red and somewhat pimply. But why not? Clothes cannot be had for the children when the father works for ten pence a day and is sick half the time, and nickel-plated bath-tubs and scented soap are not to be expected in the top of a cabin in which you cannot stand upright; and how can a child’s face be kept clean where there is no chimney, and where the room is so thick with peat smoke that you may almost cut it with a knife, and a child that never had a pair ofshoes and stockings could hardly be expected to have white legs and feet. The cold prevents that.

In our party was an American gentleman, who was blessed with an abundance of boys, but no girls, and he and his wife had been contemplating the adoption of a girl. Here was an opportunity to secure not only a girl, but just the kind of a girl that he would have given half his estate to be the father of. And so he opened negotiations.

An Irishman who knew him, explained to the father and mother that the gentleman was a man of means, that his wife was an excellent, good woman, and that the child would be adopted regularly under the laws of the State in which he lived, and would be educated, and would rank equally with his own children in the matter of inheritance, and all that. In short, Norah would be reared a lady.

Then the American struck in. She, the mother, might select a girl to accompany the child across the Atlantic, and the girl selected should go into his family as the child’s nurse, and the child should be reared in the religion of its parents.

The father and mother consulted long and anxiously. It was a terrible struggle. On the one hand was the child’s advantage; on the other, paternal and maternal love.

Finally a conclusion was arrived at.

“God help me,” said the mother, “you shall have her. I know you will be good to her.”

Then the arrangements were pushed very briskly, and, with regular American business-like vehemence. The girl selected to act as nurse was the mother’s sister, a comely girl of twenty. The American took the child, and rushed out to the haberdasher’s, and purchased an outfit for her. He put shoes and stockings on her, which was a novel experience, and a pretty little dress, and a little hat with a feather in it, and a little sash, and all that sort of thing; and he procured shoes and stockings for the elder girl, and a tidy dress, and a hat and shawl, and so forth. And then he brought them back, instructing the mother that he should leave with them for Cork the next morning at eleven, and that the girl and the child should be dressed and ready to depart.

A MOTHER’S LOVE.

The next morning came, and the American went for hischild. She was dressed, though very awkwardly. The mother had never had any experience in dressing children, and it was a wonder that she did not get the dress wrong side up. But there she was, and the mother wailed as one who was parting with everything that was dear to her, and the father lay and moaned, looking from Norah to the American. Time was up. The mother took the baby in her arms, and gave it the final embrace, and the long, loving kiss; the father took her in his arms, and kissed her; the other children looked on astounded, while the girl stood weeping.

“DROP THE CHILD!”

“Good-bye!” said the American; “I will take good care of the baby,” and, taking her from the mother’s arms, he started for the door. There was a shriek—the woman darted to him just as he was closing the door, and snatched the baby from him.

“Drop the child!” said the father. “You can’t have her for all the money there is in Ameriky.”

“No, sor!” ejaculated the mother, half way between fainting and hysterics. “I can’t part wid her!”

And she commenced undressing the baby.

“Take back yer beautiful clothes—give me back the rags that was on her—but ye can’t have the child!”

And the girl—she commenced undressing, too; for she did not want to obtain clothes under false pretenses. But the American stopped the disrobing.

“It’s bad for the child,” he said, “but somehow I can’t blame you. You are welcome to the clothes, though.”

And he left as fast as he could, and I noticed he was busy with his handkerchief about his eyes for some minutes. And I am sorry to say he indulged in a very profane soliloquy, ’till he got out of the street, and his objurgations were not leveled at the father and mother.

What became of the clothes I know not, but I presume that, when the husband died and went where landlords cease from troubling and the weary are at rest, the widow pawned them to pay the rent, and save the dead body of her husband from being pitched into the street with herself and children; and that when My Lord Bantry saw her name on the list, as paid, he remarked:

“Ah! the Widow Flanagan has paid her rent. I thought she would! What is necessary with these Irish, is to be firm with them. By the way, is she paying enough?”

And after ascertaining that the wine had been properlyfrappéd, he went to his dinner, and the gunboat, and the royal constabulary felt relieved.

It is a pleasant thing for all concerned to have the Widow Flanagan pay her rent promptly, and make no fuss about it, except, of course, for the Widow Flanagan. But she, being an Irish widow, is not to be considered. But if there is a God of justice and mercy, there will come a time when she will be considered, and then it will be made very warm for My Lord Bantry, his agent, the captain of the gunboat, the officers of the soldiery, and the whole brood of oppressors. There is a Court at which the Widow Flanagan can appear on equal terms with her landlord, but it is not in Ireland.

A RELIGIOUS OPINION.

NATURE’S LOOKING GLASS.

If I ever leaned toward the doctrines taught by the Universalists, a contemplation of the system of Bantryism has entirely and completely convinced me that they are erroneous. If there is not a lake of fire and brimstone, a very wide and very deep, and very hot one there ought to be, and when theBritish House of Lords meet there, there will always be a quorum. And My Lord will lift up his eyes to the widow Flanagan and beg for a drop of water to cool his parched tongue. But he won’t get it. He don’t deserve it.

It is impossible to make an American comprehend the width, depth and breadth of Irish misery until he has seen it with his own eyes. No other man’s eyes are good for anything in this matter, for the reason that nothing parallel exists this side of the water. And besides this the writers for the stage and of general literature have most woefully misrepresented the Irish man and woman, and very much to his and her disadvantage.

The Irishman of the stage and novel is always a rollicking, happy-go-lucky sort of a reckless fellow, with a short-tailed coat, red vest and corduroy trowsers, woolen stockings and stout brogans; with a bottle of whisky peeping out of his pocket, a blackthorn shillelah in his fist; always ready for a dance, or a fight, or for love-making, or any other pleasant employment. There is always on his head a rather bad hat, worn jauntily, however, and though he may be occasionally rather short of food, he manages always to get enough to be fat, sleek, and rosy. And then he always has a laugh on his face, a joke on his lips, and he goes through life with a perpetual “Hurroo.”

THE IRISHMAN OF THE STAGE AND NOVEL.

THE REAL AND THE IDEAL.

And Katy—she is always presented to us clad in a short woolen gown, her shapely legs enclosed in warm red stockings; and she had a bright red handkerchief about her neck,with good, comfortable shoes, and a coquettish straw hat—a buxom girl, who can dance down any lad within ten miles, and can “hurroo” as well as Pat, and a little better.

The Irish priest is always represented to us as a fat, sleek, jolly fellow, who is constantly giving his people good advice but who nevertheless is always ready to sing “The Cruiskeen Lawn,” in a “rich, mellow voice,” before a splendid fire in the house of his parishioners, with a glass of poteen in one hand and a pipe in the other, the company joining jollily in the chorus. He is supposed to live in luxury from the superstition of his people, and to have about as rosy a life as any man on earth.

All these are lies.

The Irishman is the saddest man on the surface of the globe. You may travel a week and never see a smile or hear a laugh. Utter and abject misery, starvation and helplessness, are not conducive of merriment.

THE EVICTED IRISHMAN.

The Irishman has not only no short-tailed coat, but he considers himself fortunate if he has any coat at all. He has what by courtesy may be called trowsers, but the vest is a myth. He has no comfortable woolen stockings, nor is he possessed of the regulation stage shoes. He does not sing, dance or laugh, for he has no place to sing, laugh and dance in. He is a moving pyramid of rags. A man who cuts bog all day from daylight to dark, whose diet consists of a few potatoes twice a day, is not much in the humor for dancing all night, even were there a place for him to dance in. And as for jollity, a man with a land agent watching him like a hawk to see how much he is improving his land, with the charitable intent of raisingthe rent, if by any possibility he can screw more out of him, is not in the mood to laugh, sing, dance or “hurroo.” One might as well think of laughing at a funeral. Ireland is one perpetual funeral. The ghastly procession is constantly passing.

There is unquestionably a vast fund of humor in the Irishman, which would be delightful could it have proper vent. You hear faint tones of it, as it is; but it is in the minor key, and very sad. It always has a flavor of rack-rent in it, a taste of starvation, a suggestion of eviction and death, by cold and hunger, on the road-side. It isn’t cheerful. I had much rather have the Irishman silent, than to hear this remnant of jocularity which is always streaked with blood.

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