Without an
introduction from one whom they trust they are very reticent and non-
committal. There is another party who will not be drawn into giving an
opinion for fear of their names appearing in print in company with these
opinions.
Cork is such a brilliant city, such a sunshiny city, for the sun shone
while I was there as it did not shine anywhere else where I have been
for the last two months, such a brisk, busy city, that I felt some
regret at leaving it. Cork is a busy town, but there are many idle hands
and hungry mouths within its boundaries.
The prevalence of drinking habits is deplored by many with whom I
conversed here. Speaking of the movement, now so rife, for encouraging
home manufacture, especially in the shoe trade, a lady remarked that if
there were a revival in trade without a revival in temperance many
shoemakers would only work three days a week as had been the case in
good times before.
It was a sunny day when I looked my last on the busy city on the river
Lee, on the numerous basket women that squat in its streets, some
knitting or crocheting for dear life, some sitting with arms crossed,
fat and lazy, basking contentedly in the sun beside their baskets of
miserable stunted apples that would be thrown to the pigs in Canada.
Between Cork and Mallow my travelling companion was an elderly
Scotchman, a cattle dealer, who deplored the disturbed state of the
country very feelingly. He admitted that there was undeniable need of a
revision of the land tenure but thought that the people went about
securing it in a very wrong way. I ventured to suggest that there was
likely to be an agitation in Scotland on the land question. "Aye, there
will and must be that, but they will manage it differently," said the
old gentleman. He censured my excitable country people pretty freely. I
enquired why he did not return to Scotland to live in that tranquil
country. "He had been long, out of Scotland, about forty years, and had
got into the ways of the Irish, and truly they were a kind-hearted
people and easily pleased."
Another gentleman in this compartment pointed out to me Blarney Castle
in the distance, and Blarney woollen mills nearer hand, where the
celebrated Blarney tweed is manufactured, and whispered to me that
Father - - , I did not catch the name with the noise of the cars, had
appeared in a suit of Blarney tweed. There and then I wished that every
reverend Father in Ireland was dressed in native manufacture.
A little fiddler was playing in the car for halfpence, and the Irish
gentleman paid him to play Scotch tunes in our honor, thinking we were
both Scotch, I and the old Scotch gentleman.
