Just Irish Part 5

I don't mind saying that I had stayed over a day in order to go to the fair, for I have not read Irish literature for nothing, and I was perfectly willing to see a fight and ascertain the strength of a s.h.i.+llelagh as compared with a Celtic skull.

It was a great day for Enniskillen and for the Enniskillen Guards, who were out in force. There were also pretty maidens from all the surrounding counties and not a few of the gentry who had been attracted by the jumping contests.

But--what a disappointment.

Irishmen? Why, you'll see more Irishmen any pleasant day below Fourteenth Street in New York. And those that were there were so painfully well behaved and quiet. And as for speaking the Irish dialect--well, I wish that some of the Irish comedians who have been persuaded that Irishmen wear green whiskers would come over here and listen to Irishmen speak. They wouldn't understand them, they speak so like other people.

For ginger and noise and varied interests any New England cattle show has this one beaten to a pulp--if one may use so common an expression in a newspaper.

The noisiest things there were the bulls, and they were vociferous and huge. But the men were soft spoken and there seemed little of the "Well, I swan! I hain't seen you for more'n two years. How's it goin'?" "Oh, fair to middlin'. Able to set up an' eat spoon vittles"

atmosphere in the place, although undoubtedly it was a great gathering of people who seldom met. Not a single side show. Not a three-card monte man or a whip seller or a vendor of non-intoxicants.

There was just one man selling what must have been mock oranges, for such mockeries of oranges I never saw. They were the size of peaches and the engineer told me they were filled with dusty pulp.

I bought none.

The racing and fence jumping in the afternoon were interesting, but there was no wild Yankee excitement on the part of the crowd and no hilarity. There was only one man that I noticed as having taken more than was necessary, and the only effect it had on him was to unlock the flood gates of an incoherent eloquence that caused a great deal of amus.e.m.e.nt to those who were able to extricate a sequence of ideas from the alcoholic freshet of words.

One venerable-looking man, with a flowing white beard of the sort formerly worn by Americans of the requisite years, fell from a fence where he was viewing the jumping and was knocked out for a time. He had been "overcome by the heat," at which, out of respect to him, I took off my overcoat. The Irish idea of heat is different from the New York one.

The splendid old fellow had served thirty-three years on the police force and had been a police pensioner for thirty-one years, and as he must have been twenty-one when he joined the force he was upwards of eighty-five.

Would Edward Everett Hale view a race from a picket fence? There is something in the Irish air conducive to longevity. In the evening I saw the old man standing in the doorway of a temperance hotel talking with men some seventy years younger than he.

A local tradesman told me that in the town of Enniskillen where formerly any public gathering was sure to be followed by a public fight, he had seen the Catholic band and the Orangemen's band playing amicably the same tune (I'll bet it wasn't "The Wearing of the Green"), as they marched side by side up the main street.

The world do move.

CHAPTER VI

_A Few Irish Stories_

If you enter Ireland by the north, as I did, you will not hear really satisfying Irish dialect until you reach Dublin. The dialect in the north is very like Scotch, yet if it were set down absolutely phonetically it would be neither Scotch nor Irish to the average reader, but a new and hard dialect, and he would promptly skip the story that was clothed in this strange dress.

But in Dublin one hears two kinds of speech, the most rolling, full and satisfying dialect and also the most perfect English to be found in the British Isles.

It is a delight to hear one's mother tongue spoken with such careless precision, with just the suspicion of a brogue to it. I am told it is really the way that English was spoken when the most successful playwright was not Shaw, but Shakespeare.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _DUBLIN BAY_]

The folk tale that follows was told me, not by a Dublin jarvey, but by a Dublin artist whose command of the right word was as great as his command of his brush.

He regaled me with many stories of Irishmen and Ireland and never let pa.s.s a chance to abuse the English in the most amusingly good-natured way. To him the English as a race were a hateful, selfish lot. Most of the Englishmen he knew personally were exceptions to this rule, but he was convinced that the average Englishman was a man who was nurtured in selfishness and hypocritical puritanism.

But this is far afield from his story of the first looking gla.s.s.

Once upon a time (said my friend) a man was out walking by the edge of the ocean and he picked up a looking gla.s.s.

Into the gla.s.s he looked and he saw there the face of himself.

"Oh," said he, "'tis a picture of my father," and he took it to his cabin and hung it on the wall. And often he would go to look at it, and always he said, "'Tis a picture of my father."

But one day he took to himself a wife, and when she went to the mirror and looked in she said:

"I thought you said this was a picture of your father. Sure, it is a picture of an ugly, red-headed woman. Who is she?"

"What have ye?" said the man. "Step away and let me to it."

So she stepped away and let him to it and he looked at it again.

"Ah," said he with a sigh (for his father was dead), "'tis a picture of my father."

"Step away," said she, "and let me see if it's no eyes at all I have.

What have you with pictures of women?"

So he stepped away and let her to it, and she looked in it again.

"An ugly, red-headed woman it is," said she. "You had a lover before me," and she was very angry.

"Sure we'll leave it to the priest," said he.

And when the priest pa.s.sed by they called him in and said, "Father, tell us what it is that this picture is about. I say it is my father, who is dead."

"And I say it is a red-haired woman I never saw," said the woman.

"Step away," said the priest, with authority, "and let me to it."

So they stepped away and let the priest to it, and he looked at it.

"Sure neither you nor the woman was right. What eyes have ye? It is a picture of a holy father. I will take it to adorn the church."

And he took it away with him, to the gladness of the wife, who hated the woman her husband had in the frame, and to the grief of the man, who could see his father no more.

But in the church was the picture of a holy man.

Quite the folklore quality.

I heard a story of a well-known Dublin priest, Father Healy, very witty and very kindly, who was invited by a millionaire, probably a brewer, to go on a cruise with him.

Over the seas they sailed and landed at many ports, and the priest could not put his hand into his pocket, for he was the guest of the millionaire.

At last they returned to Dublin and the millionaire, being a man of simplicity of character, the two took a tram to their destination.

"Now it's my turn," said the priest, with a twinkle in his eye, and, putting his hand in his pocket, he paid the fare for the two.