Peeps at Many Lands

An excerpt from CHAPTER I - ARRIVAL

It may safely be said that any boy or girl who takes a peep at Ireland will want another peep. Between London and Ireland, so far as atmosphere and the feeling of things is concerned, there is a world of distance. Of course, it is the difference between two races, for the Irish are mainly Celtic, and the Celtic way of thinking and speaking and feeling is as different as possible from the Saxon or the Teuton, and the Celt has influenced the Anglo-Irish till they are as far away from the English nearly as the Celts themselves. If you are at all alert, you will begin to find the difference as soon as you step off the London and North Western train at Holyhead and go on board the steamer for Kingstown. The Irish steward and stewardess will have a very different way from the formal English way. They will be expansive. They will use ten words to one of the English official. Their speech will be picturesque; and if you are gifted with a sense of humour - and if you are not, you had better try to beg, borrow or steal it before you go to Ireland - there will be much to delight you. I once heard an Irish steward on a long-sea boat at London Docks remonstrate with the passengers in this manner:

"Gentlemen, gentlemen, will yez never get to bed? Yez know as well as I do that every light on the boat is out at twelve o'clock. It's now a quarter to wan, and out goes the lights in ten minutes."

There is what the Englishman calls an Irish bull in this speech; but the Irish bull usually means that something is left to the imagination. I will leave you to discover for yourself the hiatus which would have made the steward's remark a sober English statement.

These things make an Irish heart bound up as exultantly as the lark springs to the sky of a day of April - that is to say, of an Irish exile home-returning - for the dweller in Ireland grows used to such pearls of speech.

Said a stewardess to whom I made a request that she would bring to my cabin a pet-dog who, under the charge of the cook, was making the night ring with his lamentations: "Do you want to have me murdered?" This only conveyed that it was against the regulations. But while she looked at me her eye softened. "I'll do it for you," she said, with a subtle suggestion that she wouldn't do it for anyone else; and then added insinuatingly, "if the cook was to mind the basket?" "To be sure," said I, being Irish. "Ask the cook if he will kindly mind the basket and let me have the dog." And so it was done, and the cook had his perquisite, while I had the dog....