_The Joys of Third-Class Travel_
In Ireland, if you wish to travel third class, it is well to get into
a carriage marked "non smoking." If there is no sign on it it is a
smoking compartment, quite probably, the custom here being often the
direct opposite of that in Great Britain.
If you are traveling with women in the party the second class is
advisable, but the third has this advantage--it saves you money that
you can spend on worthless trinkets that may be confiscated by our
customs house officers.
I have been ten days in the north of Ireland and I met my first
drunken man in a third-class carriage.
Will the W. C. T. U. kindly make a note of this? Allow me to repeat
for the benefit of those who took up the paper after I had begun--I
have been ten days in Ireland and have traveled afoot, acar, and on
train and tram through half a dozen northern counties and have been on
the outlook for picturesque sights, and I saw my first drunken man
yesterday afternoon--the afternoon of the tenth day.
He was in a third-class smoking compartment, and in my hurry to make
my train I stepped in without noticing the absence of the sign.
He was a very old and rather nice-looking, clean-shaven man, and his
instincts were for the most part of the kindliest, but he would have
irritated Charles Dickens exceedingly, for he was an inveterate
spitter, of wonderful aim, and, like the beautiful lady in the
vaudeville shows whose husband surrounds her with knives without once
touching her, I was surrounded but unharmed. When the old man saw my
straw hat a gleam of interest came into his dull eye, and he came
over and sat down right opposite me.
"Are ye a Yankee?" said he. I assured him that I was. "I thought so be
your hat, but you don't talk like a Yankee." So I handed him out a few
"by Goshes," which he failed to recognize and told me plainly that he
doubted my nationality. Except for my hat I was no Yankee. Now my hat
was made in New York, but I knew that this was a subtlety that would
pass him, so I again proclaimed my nationality, and he asked me with
great politeness if I objected to his smoking (keeping up his
fusillade all the time) and I with polite insincerity told him that I
didn't. For his intentions were of the kindliest. I believe he would
have stopped spitting if I had asked him to, but I hated to deprive so
old a man of so quiet a pleasure.
The talk now turned to the condition of Ireland, and he told me in his
maudlin, thickly articulated way that Ireland was on the eve of a
great industrial revival. As I had repeatedly heard this from the lips
of perfectly sober people I believed it. I told him that he would live
to see a more prosperous Ireland.
[Illustration: GEESE IN GALWAY]
This he refused to believe and once more asked me if I was as American
as my hat. I assured him that perhaps I was even more so and that his
grandchildren would surely live to see Triumphant Ireland. This he
accepted gladly, and coming to his place of departure, bade me kindly
farewell, and stumbled over his own feet out of the compartment. And I
immediately changed to one where smoking was not allowed.
It was on the same journey that I stopped at a place called Omagh, and
while waiting for a connection we were at the station some time. I was
reading, but suddenly became conscious that some young people were
having a very happy time, for peal after peal of laughter rang
through the station. After awhile I looked up and found that I was the
cause of all this joy on the part of young Ireland. There were three
or four girls absolutely absorbed in me and my appearance. I supposed
it was again the American hat, but suddenly one of the girls "pulled a
face" that I recognized as a caricature of my own none too merry
countenance, and the group went off into new peals of merriment.
"How pleasant a thing it is," thought I, "that by the mere exhibition
of the face nature gave me in America I can amuse perfect strangers in
a far-off land," and I smiled benignantly at the young women, which
had the effect of nearly sending them into hysterics.
Life was a little darker for them after the train pulled out, but I
could not stay in Omagh for the mere purpose of exciting their
risibles by the exposition of my gloomy features.
Everywhere I go I am a marked man. I feared for a time that there was
something the matter with my appearance, but at Enniskillen I fell in
with a young locomotive engineer from California, and he told me that
he too aroused attention wherever he went, and that in Cork youngsters
followed him shouting "Yankee!" Fancy a "Yankee" from California!
At Enniskillen I went for a walk with this young engine driver and we
passed two pretty young girls, of whom he inquired the way to the
park. It seems that the young women were on their way there themselves
and they very obligingly showed us how to go. It occurred to the
gallant young Californian that such an exhibition of kindliness was
worth rewarding, and he asked the ladies if they did not care to
stroll through the park. They, having nothing else to do and the
evening being fine, consented, and we made a merry quartette.
I have been somewhat disappointed in the Irishman as a wit in my
actual contact with him on his native heath, but these girls showed
that wit was still to be found. They were very quick at decorous
repartee, and although my San Francisco friend neglected to introduce
me to them (possibly because he did not know their names), I paid a
tribute to their gifts of conversation.
Nor should it be imagined for a moment that they were of that
sisterhood so deservedly despised by that estimable and never to be
too well thought of Mrs. Grundy--they were simply working girls who
were out for an evening stroll and who saw in a chance conversation
with representatives of the extreme east and west of America an
opportunity for mental improvement.
They were, it may be, unconventional, but how much more interesting
are such people than those whose lives are ordered by rule.
We left the young women in the park intent upon the glories of a day
that was dying hard (after eighteen hours of daylight) and as we made
our way to the hotel we agreed that a similar readiness to converse
with strangers on the part of young women in New York would have given
reasonable cause for various speculations.
But Ireland has a well-earned reputation for a certain thing, which
the just published table of vital statistics for the year 1906 goes
far to strengthen.
In the morning the young locomotive pusher and myself had attended a
cattle show at Enniskillen fair grounds.
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
shillelagh 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 amusement 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.