Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 March 1886 — Ireland To-day. [ARTICLE]

Ireland To-day.

Ireland's picturesqueness lies in its coast-scenery. Its center is mostly a dettd level of bog or pastureland. Therq are few or none of the smiling harvest fields which make England so pretty; the climate refuses to grow cereals, and, alas! the people have not the persistent industry required for cultivated farming. Neat hedgerows, well-kept foodlands, good roads, and, above all, the sweet, <«>ntented-looking villages and hamlets that one sees continually in England, must not be looked for here. Yet it was a green and pleasant country that, we swept through—no, crawled through—lrish railways always 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 any one know how delightful it is to drive across country in an outside car, with just enough necessity for holding on to keep your mind amused, and just enough jolting and shaking to give you “the least taste in life” of horse exercise? How pleasant to feel the wind in your face, and see the rain-clouds drifting behind you—to catch in passing the sights and scents of moorland gorse, of ditch-bank primroses, and hidden hyacinths, 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 always disappear. And for 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 f and ( then a group of little Kerry cows—mostly black—or a family of hapyp" pigs, often blaekrtoodotted the pastures, implying another family close by, who turned out to gaze at us from what might be either cabin or cow-shed, or both—half-clad boys or girls, one could hardly tell which, with xvfld shocks of hair and splendid Irish eyes, full of fun and intelligence. And sometimes we passed a woman with a shawl over her head, Irish fashion, carrying a huge bundle and perhaps a child as well, - who first looked then looked away. Thin, povertypinched 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 not to be despised. Some, perhaps, drop a curtsey to “the quality,” but, generally,' they just look' at US with a dull curiosity, and pass On. Little enough have “the quality” done for them, poor souls!