They Were Rinsing
Out Some Woollen Stuffs After Dying Them Blue.
They had warm petticoats
of madder red, and I was glad to see them look so comfortably clad and
thrifty.
After returning to the hotel I was waited on by an elderly lady of the
peasant class, a woman over eighty years of age. She had for sale some
pillow lace edging of her own manufacture, which she offered at
threepence per yard. This was the way she made her living, paid her rent
and kept herself out of the workhouse. The lace was pretty and very
strong. She generally succeeds in disposing of it to lady tourists.
There were some lady tourists as well as gentlemen staying at Cong. They
were on pleasure bent, and had been dreadfully annoyed and disgusted in
Galway at the heartbreaking scene attending the departure of some poor
Irish emigrants. They are unreasonable in their grief, and take parting
as if it were death; but it is as death to many of the aged relatives
who will see these faces whom they love no more. I could not help
thinking how differently people are constituted. When I saw the
streaming eyes, the faces swollen with weeping, and heard the agonized
exclamations, the calls upon God for help to bear the parting, for a
blessing on the departing, I had to weep with them. These people were
all indignation where they were not amused. The old women's cries were
ill-bred howlings to their ears, their grief a thing to laugh at.
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