The Charm of Ireland

f the place was out in the fields. We had seen the same thing at Dublin the Sunday before-every open space near the city crowded with men and women and children; fr

grass on the damp ground is another pr

the other a sort of anti-type called an inside car. The difference is that, in an outside car you sit on the inside, that is in the middle with your feet hanging over the wheel, while in an inside car you sit on the outside, that is over the wheel with your feet hanging down in t

l rate for the use of one. So when we got off the train at the Cork terminus, I passed under review the cars standing in the street in front of it, while each individual j

an hour or two," I said. "How

ied, and wheeled his car in

o answer my qu

five shillings

hillings. So I passed on to the third. His price was three shillings. I suppose if I had passed once again, the pric

ome down in almost exactly the same place from which they go up. The jarvey encouraged him from time to time by touching him gently with the whip, but the horse never varied his gait, except that, whenever he came to a grade, he walked. Sometimes we would catch up with a pedestrian sauntering in the same direction, and then it was quite excit

centuries later, and captured it; and then the Anglo-Normans took it from the Danes and managed to keep it by ceaseless vigilance. The Irish peril was so imminent, that the English had to bar the gates

own taxes and made its own laws and even set up its own mint, and when the English Parliament attempted to interfere, invited it to mind its own business. The climax came when that picturesque impostor, Perkin Warbeck, landed in the town, was hailed as a son of t

and embarked for the New World. Hundreds more, unable to win farther, lay down in the streets and died, and every road leading into the town was hedged with unburied bodies. That ghastly torrent of emigration has kept up ever since, though it reached its flood some twenty years ago,

tself, but because of some verses written about its bells by a poet who lies buried in its churchyard. St. Anne Shandon, with its tall, parti-coloured tower surmounted by its fish-

fection and

nk of the S

ild would, in the

y cradle thei

onder where

fonder, sweet

f Shandon, that

waters of t

that afternoon, who hailed our advent as an unexpected addition to the pleasures and excitements of the day, and followed along, inspecting us curiously, and commenting frankly upon the details of our attire. The impression we made was, I think, on the whole, favourable, but there is a certain novelty

nted to see one of the schools, so Monday morning we sallied forth in search of this one. We found it without difficulty-a great barrack of a building opening upon a court. Both nuns were there, and I do not remember ever having received anywhere a warmer welcome. Certainly we might see the lace-makers, and Sister Catherine took

t aristocrat of laces of which one sees so much in Belgium; and some of it was Limerick, and there were other kinds whose names I have forgotten, but all of it was beautifully done. The designing is the work of Sister Catherine, and, while I am very far from being a connoisseur, some of the pieces she afterwards sho

sweetly thy gre

et in the ri

meadows my faith

west! the world'

ide to the poor

hospitality h

is seen in the

is welcomed wit

brave; but, the

ace with their

cheeks of thy da

g blush that say

forever, my de

wander an ex

y mountains, no

end its own cu

ook on a beauty which the lines by themselves do not possess as we heard it sung that morning, with the girls, bending to their work, joining in the ch

lettering is superb. The great events in the life of every nun are recorded here, and those events are three: when she became a novice, when she took the final vows, and when she died. Those are the only events that concern the community, except that sometime

g time I had been growing to boyhood and manhood and middle age, she had been immured here in this convent at Cork; during all the years that I had been reading and writing and talking with men and women and knocking about the wo

e creatures. They were quite the reverse of that; they were fairly bubbling over with good humour and with bi

s to us. We have a concert nearly every evening, and it's

uperior, a very delicate, placid, transparent woman of more than eighty, who reminded me

four-square castle which cost its owner only fourpence. The story goes that, in 1636, John Archdeckan marched away to the war in Flanders, and his wife determined to surprise him, on his return, by presenting him with a stately castle. So she gathered a grea

een-clad hills pressing about it on all sides, and shrouding the entrance so completely that one might fancy oneself in a landlocked lake. Queenstown is

ur of the event. In 1849, Queen Victoria paid one of her very few visits to Ireland, and sailed into the Cove of Cork. As she herself wrote, "To give the people the satisfaction of calling the place Queenstown, in honour of its being the first spot on which I set foot on Irish ground, I stepped on shore amidst the roar of cannon and t

egians mostly, who had been brought ashore from the stranded Haverford, and who spent their time wandering aimlessly up and down, trying to find out what was going to happen to them. There were many sailors and marines knocking about the grog-s

me and imposing-good Gothic, though perhaps a trifle too florid for the purest taste; but the effect of the interior is ruined by the absur

found that the steamer did not start until the fifteenth of June, so most regretfully that excursion had to be abandoned. Those who have made it tell me it is a ve