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Show THE EMERALD ISLE OF TO-DAY. Impressions Done Into Skelchwork Engaging- Spectacles. Ireland's picturesquesness lies in its coast scenery. Its center is a dead level of bog or pasture land. There are few or none of the smiling harvest fields which make England so pretty; the climate refuses re-fuses to grow cereals, and. alas! the people peo-ple have not the persistent industry required re-quired for cultivated farming. Neat hedgerows, well-kept woodlands, good roads, and, above all, the sweet contented content-ed looking villages and hamlets that one sees continually in England, must not be looked for here. Yet it was a greenland pleasant country that we swept through no, crawled through Irish railways al-: ways crawl and reaching our station at last, we mounted, defiant of old Time, the familiar outside .car with its lively Irish pony. Excellent animal ! That day he did forty miles in sixteen hours. Does anyone know how delightful it is to drive across the country in an outside car, with just enough necessity for holding hold-ing on to keep your mind amused, and just enough jolting and shaking to give you "the least taste in life" of horse exercise ex-ercise ? How pleasant to feel the wind in your face and see the rain clouds drifting drift-ing behind you to catch in passing the sights and scents of moore and gorse, of ditch bank, primroses and hidden hyacinths, hya-cinths, and the yellow gleam of whole acres of cowslips. I never saw so many cowslips or so large ; a sign, alas ! of poor land. When the soil improves, the cowslips cow-slips always disappear. And for birds-there birds-there seemed a blackbird in every tall tree, and a dozen larks singing madly over every bit of common. But of human habitations there were very few. Now and then a group of little Kerry cows mostly black or a famity of happy pigs, often black, too, dotted the pastures, implying im-plying another family close by, who turned out to gaze from what might be either cabin or cow shed, or both half clad boys or girls, one could hardly tell which, "with wild shocks of hair and splendid Irish eyes, full of fun and intelligence. intel-ligence. And sometimes we passed a woman with a shawl over her head, Irish fashion, carrying a huge bundle and perhaps per-haps a child as well, who first looked at us and then looked away. Thin, poverty-! pinched faces they often were, but neither coarse, sullen, nor degraded, nothing like the type of low Irish that one sees in towns. 'Much to be pitied truly, but certainly cer-tainly not to be despised. Some, perhaps, tlrop'a curtesy to "the quality," but, generally, gen-erally, they look at us with a dull curiosity curios-ity and pass on. Little enough have "the quality" done for them, poor souls ! |
