FAMILIARITY OF DOMESTICS.-AN OLD CRONE. 83 In England, where servants are always kept at a proper distance, they seldom display that impertinent familiarity which is so often met with in Ireland, and of which the coachman of my friend, a well-fed, good-humoured-looking fellow, who attended us through the stables and farm-buildings, was a striking instance. Although his master was present during the whole time, the servant never ceased talking, and he ever preceded his master, who followed silently and modestly behind us. "This stable we finished only last year," said the coachman to me. "It has given us a deal of trouble, for we had first to blow away the whole of that great rock. May it please your honour to remark how much we had to blast there. But we shall have a beautiful view when those trees there are felled. Look down there, your honour, all that are his dominions," continued he, pointing to his master. months he'll have finished the new building he has begun." No English servant would have presumed thus to conduct himself towards his master, and yet these Irish servants are taken from a tenantry infinitely more dependent than the peasantry of England. There is, however, a great deal of familiarity in the character of the Irishman, which enables him readily to assume an equality with his superiors; and as with this familiarity he also unites wit and humour, he is enabled, like the fools of the middle ages, to take more liberties with his master. Despotism, too, has the effect of making its slaves insolent and forward. Domestic fools were kept only by the despots of the middle ages, but not by the Roman consuls, the presidents of America, or constitutional kings. "In two Whilst at Edenvale I heard of another old crone, named Consideen, to whom the people ascribed supernatural powers. During a short excursion into the country, I met her in a neighbour's house which I happened to enter. The cabin of this neighbour stood quite alone, on a desolate rocky hill, which formed a dismal contrast to the beautiful bushy glen. The old octogenarian dame sat leaning on a stick, by the turf fire of her friend. She told me she had often seen Death, supported upon two crutches, standing at the end of the meadow, when any one of her family was going to die. She knew for certain, too, that, old as she was, she was not to die yet a while, as Death would first come and give her notice. There are few old women in Ireland who have not visions of some kind or other, in which they inflexibly and firmly believe. "Oh, if your honour could only hear these two women talking together," said my guide who had brought me to Consideen, "you'd then be astonished at the hundreds of beautiful stories they can tell; but you are strange to them now, and they have not the courage to speak out." I had been informed that in the same neighbourhood was a spot which the people regarded as a meeting-ground of the fairies; and after some entreaty I was conducted to the place. Passing across the rough rocky crown of the hill, we gained its extreme edge, where I found a round grass-plot, some two hundred paces in circumference, which, they said, was sacred to the "good people." I inquired whether they had themselves ever actually seen the fairies. "Very often, in whole troops," they replied. "However," remarked one, "I am always on my guard against them, for they once led me on a bad road, where I went. astray, tumbled over something I took for the root of a tree, and broke my little finger.' 66 But," said I, "I cannot conceive why you call such folk, good people. If they treated me this way, I would call them bad people." "That may be, your honour; but may be I annoyed them in some way or other, unknown to myself, and sure it was very good of them to break my little finger only; but I should not like to vex them by calling them what your honour calls them." "See what a brain these people have!" whispered my companion in my ear. Wondrous indeed are the contrasts and strange the thoughts which present themselves to the mind when standing on a bare, rocky, boggy fairy-haunted hill, with a few smoky turfcabins sticking to it, and inhabited by a couple of old visionaries, whilst opposite to it is another hill, beautiful, flowery, bushy, parklike, with enlightened inhabitants. On my return to Edenvale I visited some of the splendid mansions in its neighbourhood. They appeared to me not less spectral than that fairy-ground, for not a human being was to be found in them. The white window-blinds were drawn down, and all was still and silent as the grave. Their proprietors were "absentees" in England, where they spend their Irish revenues. Such spectral deserted palaces are, alas! like the fairy-grounds and ruins, but too often to be seen in Ireland. The wealthy Protestant proprietors have a hundred reasons for not finding themselves at home among their poor Roman Catholic tenants. The wild and uncultivated country, which is not so easily remedied the barbarism of the people, who sometimes make attempts on the lives of their landlords-the greater attractions of English society-the unfortunate division of the Irish community into a number of hostile parties-and perhaps a certain feeling of shame and remorse for the injustice of the legalized tyranny which the rich Irish landlords exercise over the poor;-all this may have driven many wealthy persons from the country, and produced the RESIDENTS AND ABSENTEES. 85 evil called "absenteeism." There are many families, also, who possess estates both in Ireland and England; and all these prefer residing in the latter. The more to be praised, therefore, are those landlords who remain at home, live on good terms with their tenantry, and, by ruling them in person, heal many of their wounds. There are many who make themselves, in a certain degree, voluntary martyrs; and as my hospitable host of Edenvale was one of these, I returned to his house with stronger feelings of esteem for his character, and unwillingly took leave of him on the following day. OF CHAPTER IX. KILRUSH AND FATHER MATHEW. MELANCHOLY ASPECT OF THE COUNTRY-IRISH DWELLINGS-NAKEDNESS ISM"BENEFITS 66 STINENCE-MEANING OF THE WORDS TEETOTALLER" AND 66 TEETOTAL-DURATION OF TEMPERANCE IMPROVED CONDITION FUTURE CONSUMPTION OF SPIRITUOUS LIQUORS IN IRELAND, ENGLAND, AND SCOTLAND-PROPORTION TO THE POPULATION. The country which extends westward from Ennis and Edenvale is the dark side of the county of Clare-the wildest, poorest, and most unfruitful part of it. Two reasons induced me to travel through this wretched country. First, I had heard that the celebrated Father Mathew was expected at Kilrush, which is the most easterly town on the Shannon; and, secondly, in the neighbourhood of this town is one of the most beautiful of the "Round Towers' of Ireland, and the ruins of the "Seven Churches," which I was anxious to see. The distance from Edenvale to Kilrush is about sixteen English miles; yet along this whole dis trict, although the eastern main-road of the county passes through it, I did not find a village, nay, not even a single, I will not say regular, but even tolerable human habitation. The landscape was every where bare, and devoid of foliage of any kind; the colour of the land, so far as I could perceive, was the most melancholy in the world, namely, brown, and dirty red or black; the whole surface even of the mountains and rocks is covered with bog-stuff; no alternation of green meadows, sparkling streams, and wooded hills, but all peat and moor; and even when a rising ground afforded an extensive prospect, still nothing was to be seen but a greater extent of peat and moor, yet more barren rocks, black mountains, and ruined cabins. It made me melancholy to travel through this country. But how much more melancholy must it be, to live here as a glebæ adscriptus, a dependent on a hard master, and, moreover, the father of a row of ragged children! In Hungary, Esthonia, Lithuania, and the neighbouring countries, dwellings are to be seen miserable enough in appearance; but such wretched hovels as present themselves to the view of the traveller here, and, I am sorry to say, in many other parts of Ireland, can scarcely be met with in any of the countries I have named. It is a piece of good fortune, that the sky is here in general so dull, and the air so full of the smoke and smell of turf, that all this misery is not distinctly visible. Could one see every thing fully, and in detail, it would be almost beyond endurance. The fields adjoining the cabins are in the most disorderly state, and evidently tilled in the most negligent manner; they are usually without any fences, so that the desolate turf-bog mixes with them, or they are only surrounded by walls, the stones of which have all tumbled down one over another. I remember that I once pitied the poor Lettes, in Livonia, because they possess dwellings formed merely of round tree-stumps, with the interstices stuffed with moss. I pitied them especially on account of their low doors, and their small windows, and glad would I have been to see their chimneys better constructed. How many melancholy reflections arose in my mind when I beheld their scanty, rude, and wretched household! Now, may Heaven forgive me for my ignorance! I might have spared myself all this, had I known, as I now do, that it has pleased God to lay far greater privations on another people. Since I have seen Ireland, I find that even the poorest of the Lettes, Esthonians, and Finlanders dwell and live very respectably; and that, in ninety cases out of a hundred, Paddy would think himself as well off as a king, if he were dressed, lodged, and fed like these people. To him who has seen Ireland, no mode of life, in any other part of Europe, however wretched, will seem SUPERIOR COMFORTS OF OTHER NATIONS. 87 pitiable. Nay, even the condition of savages will appear endurable, and to be preferred. A log hut carefully stuffed with moss-what comfort! Paddy's house is usually built only of clay; and how? Why, one shovelful of earth heaped upon another, with some field stones mixed up in it, till the walls are sufficiently high. A house regularly roofed with straw or bark-how delightful! But Paddy covers his cabin only with sods taken from his bogs. Small windows in the walls, neatly fitted with glass panes, or even half-transparent bladder, or talc, as here and there in Wallachia, and in some parts of Russia-bladders, good heavens, what a luxury! Paddy has houses enough in which there is not even the semblance of a window, and only one single square hole in the front, which serves at once for window, chimney, house-door, and stable-door, since light, smoke, men, pigs, all pass in and out through this hole. An intelligent French writer, De Beaumont, who has been in Ireland, and also among the North American Indians, assures us that the wants of these wild barbarians are in general better supplied than those of the poor Irish; and truly one might almost believe, that greater physical privations are endured by the Irish, than by the people of any other country, not only in Europe, but throughout the whole world. Indeed, look in whatever direction we may for a comparison, the Irishman stands alone, and his misery is without an equal. This can never be placed in too strong a light for if it is true, that the misery of the Irishman is unique on this globe, every friend of humanity must feel himself called upon to devote his thoughts and his exertions to provide a remedy for the evil. The Russian, it is true, is often the bondsman of a harder master than the Irishman; but his food and lodging are as good as he would wish, and there is no trace of Irish beggary about him. He feels happy in his bondage too, and is not, like the Irishman in his yearnings for freedom, continually biting his chains, or vainly attempting to break them. The Hungarians, also, do not belong to the nations which are most delicately lodged; but what good white bread does not the very lowest of them eat, and what wine does he not drink? Would the Hungarian for a moment believe that there are people enough in a Christian land who can afford to eat nothing but potatoes, day after day? The Servians and the Bosnians are reckoned among the poorest and most pitiable people of Europe, and the appearance of their villages is certainly not very inviting. But how well dressed these people are ! If Paddy could only peep into a Servian dwelling, and see a Servian woman sitting there in her gala dress, and the men |