"Do you know Donegal?" asked I of the waiter, giving to my p.r.o.nunciation of the word a long second and a short third syllable.
"No, your honor, never heard of him," was the answer.
"But it"s a place I"m asking for,--a county," said I, with some impatience.
"Faix, maybe it is," said he; "but it"s new to me, all the same."
"He means Donegal," said a red-whiskered man with a bronzed weather-beaten face, and a stern defiant air, that invited no acquaintanceship.
"Oh, Donegal," chimed in the waiter. "Begorra! it would n"t be easy to know it by the name your honor gav" it."
"Are you looking for any particular place in that county?" asked the stranger in a tone sharp and imperious as his former speech.
"Yes," said I, a.s.suming a degree of courtesy that I thought would be the best rebuke to his bluntness; "but I "ll scarcely trust myself with the p.r.o.nunciation after my late failure. This is the place I want;" and I drew forth my uncle"s letter and showed the address.
"Oh, that"s it, is it?" cried he, reading aloud. ""The Reverend Daniel Dudgeon, Killyrotherum, Donegal." And are you going there? Oh, I see you are," said he, turning his eyes to the foot of the address. ""Favored by Paul Gosslett, Esq." and you are Paul Gosslett."
"Yes, sir, with your kind permission, I am Paul Gosslett," said I, with what I hoped was a chilling dignity of manner.
"If it"s only my permission you want, you may be anything you please,"
said he, turning his insolent stare full on me.
I endeavored not to show any sensitiveness to this impertinence, and went on with my dinner, the stranger"s table being quite close to mine.
"It"s your first appearance in Ireland, I suspect," said he, scanning me as he picked his teeth, and sat carelessly with one leg crossed over the other.
I bowed a silent acquiescence, and he went on. "I declare that I believe a c.o.c.kney, though he has n"t a word of French, is more at home on the Continent than in Ireland." He paused for some expression of opinion on my part, but I gave none. I filled my gla.s.s, and affected to admire the color of the wine, and sipped it slowly, like one thoroughly engaged in his own enjoyments.
"Don"t you agree with me?" asked he, fiercely.
"Sir, I have not given your proposition such consideration as would ent.i.tle me to say I concur with it or not."
"That"s not it at all!" broke he in, with an insolent laugh; "but you won"t allow that you "re a c.o.c.kney."
"I protest, sir," said I, sternly; "I have yet to learn that I "m bound to make a declaration of my birth, parentage, and education to the first stranger I sit beside in a coffee-room."
"No, you "re not,--nothing of the kind,--for it"s done for you. It "s done in spite of you, when you open your mouth. Did n"t you see the waiter running out of the room with the napkin in his mouth when you tried to say Donegal? Look here, Paul," said he, drawing his chair confidentially towards my table. "We don"t care a rush what you do with your H"s, or your W"s, either; but, if we can help it, we won"t have our national names miscalled. We have a pride in them, and we "ll not suffer them to be mutilated or disfigured. Do you understand me now?"
"Sufficiently, sir, to wish you a very good-night," said I, rising from the table, and leaving my pint of sherry, of which I had only drunk one gla.s.s.
As I closed the coffee-room door, I thought--indeed, I "m certain--I heard a loud roar of laughter.
""Who is that most agreeable gentleman I sat next at dinner?" asked I of the waiter.
"Counsellor MacNamara, sir. Isn"t he a nice man?"
"A charming person," said I.
"I wish you heard him in the coort, sir. By my conscience, a witness has a poor time under him! He "d humbug you if you was an archbishop."
"Call me at five," said I, pa.s.sing up the stairs, and impatient to gain my room and be alone with my indignation.
I pa.s.sed a restless, feverish night, canva.s.sing with myself whether I would not turn back and leave forever a country whose first aspect was so forbidding and unpromising. What stories had I not heard of Irish courtesy to strangers,--Irish wit and Irish pleasantry! Was this, then, a specimen of that captivating manner which makes these people the French of Great Britain? Why, this fellow was an unmitigated savage!
Having registered a vow not to open my lips to a stranger till I reached the end of my journey, and to affect deafness rather than be led into conversation, I set off the next day, by train, for Derry. True to my resolve, I only uttered the word "beer" till I arrived in the evening.
The next day I took the steamer to a small village called Cushnagorra, from whence it was only ten miles by a good mountain-road to Killyrotherum Bay. I engaged a car to take me on, and at last found myself able to ask a few questions without the penalty of being cross-examined by an impertinent barrister, and being made the jest of a coffee-room.
I wanted to learn something about the people to whose house I was going, and asked Pat, accordingly, if he knew Mr. Dudgeon.
"Troth I do, sir, well," said he.
"He"s a good kind of man, I"m told," said I.
"He is, indeed, sir; no betther."
"Kind to the poor, and charitable?"
"Thrue for you; that"s himself."
"And his family is well liked down here?"
"I"ll be bound they are. There"s few like them to the fore."
Rather worried by the persistent a.s.sent he gave me, and seeing that I had no chance of deriving anything like an independent opinion from my courteous companion, I determined to try another line. After smoking a cigar and giving one to my friend, who seemed to relish it vastly, I said, as if incidentally, "Where I got that cigar, Paddy, the people are better off than here."
"And where"s that, sir?"
"In America, in the State of Virginia."
"That"s as thrue as the Bible. It"s elegant times they have there."
"And one reason is," said I, "every man can do what he likes with his own. You have a bit of land here, and you dare n"t plant tobacco; or if you sow oats or barley, you must n"t malt it. The law says, "You may do this, and you sha"n"t do that;" and is that freedom, I ask, or is it slavery?"
"Slavery,--devil a less," said he, with a cut of his whip that made the horse plunge into the air.
"And do you know why that"s done? Do you know the secret of it all?"
"Sorra a bit o" me."
"I"ll tell you, then. It"s to keep up the Church; it"s to feed the parsons that don"t belong to the people,--that"s what they put the taxes on tobacco and whiskey for. What, I "d like to know, do you and I want with that place there with the steeple? What does the Rev. Daniel Dudgeon do for you or me? Grind us,--squeeze us,--maybe, come down on us when we "re trying to sc.r.a.pe a few shillings together, and carry it off for t.i.thes."
"Shure and he"s a hard man! He"s taking the herrins out of the net this year,--for every ten herrins he takes one."
"And do they bear that?"
"Well, they do," said he, mournfully; "they"ve no spirit down here; but over at Muggle-na-garry they put slugs in one last winter."
"One what?"