Limerick is full of old memorials of
present magnificence and of past and present need. The inhabitants
proudly tell you that it never was conquered, not considering
capitulation conquest. The city raised the first monument to O'Connell.
Of course I saw it, and thought it a good likeness. There is a square of
grass and trees near it, where is a monument of Spring Rice, he who,
when O'Connell was sick once, a political sickness, was said to be in
despair:
"Poor Spring Rice, with his phiz all gloom,
Kept noiselessly creeping about the room;
His innocent nose in anguish blowing,
Murmuring forth, 'He's going, going.'"
I did not hear the sweet bells that charmed the life out of the poor
wandering Italian, still I think I have perhaps told enough about the
ancient city of Limerick on the Shannon.
From Limerick up through Clare, the railway passes along by the river
Fergus, a big tributary of the Shannon. A Clare man informed me that
Clare returned Dan O'Connell to Parliament. He sank his voice into an
emphatic whisper to inform us that Dan was the first Catholic who ever
got into Parliament.
I have been taken for this one and that one since I came to Ireland, and
have been amused or annoyed, as the case may be, but I am totally at a
loss to know whom I resembled or was taken for in the County Clare. A
decent-looking countrywoman shook hands with me, telling me she had seen
me in some part of Clare a month ago, and I had never set foot into the
county until to-day. "You remember me, my lady, I saw you when you
stopped at - - " some whispered name with an O to it. The woman's face
was strangely familiar, but I was on entirely new ground.
There is enchantment in this western country. I was completely
bewildered when a frieze-coated farmer told me, "That was a grand speech
you made at Tuam, and true every word of it." It was a little confusing,
seeing that I have never been in Tuam, or very near it at all. This old
gentleman enquired coaxingly if I were going to speak at Ennis, and
assured me of a grand welcome to be got up in a hurry. Then he and the
farmer's wife exchanged thoughts - that "I did not want anybody to know I
was in it" - in aggravating whispers as I looked steadily out of the
windows to assure myself that I was I. My friend in frieze then began to
draw my attention to certain landmarks, the ruins of this abbey and that
castle, and the other graveyard as points of interest with which I was
supposed to be familiar.
Truly this part of Clare seemed to have any amount of square castles in
ruined grandeur scattered along the line of rail.
