AN OCTOBER ABROAD 221 



joining in that doleful gastriloqiiial chorus that so 

 often goes up from the cabins of those Channel 

 steamers. 



I hardly know why I went to Ireland, except it 

 was to indulge the few drops of Irish blood in my 

 veins, and maybe also with a view to shorten my 

 sea voyage by a day. I also felt a desire to see one 

 or two literary men there, and in this sense my 

 journey was eminently gratifying; but so far from 

 shortening my voyage by a day, it lengthened it by 

 three days, that being the time it took me to re- 

 cover from the effects of it; and as to the tie of 

 blood, I think it must nearly all have run out, for 

 I felt but few congenital throbs while in Ireland. 



The Englishman at home is a much more lovable 

 animal than the Englishman abroad, but Pat in Ire- 

 land is even more of a pig than in this country. 

 Indeed, the squalor and poverty, and cold, skinny 

 wretchedness one sees in Ireland, and (what freezes 

 our sympathies) the groveling, swiny shiftlessness 

 that pervades these hovels, no traveler can be pre- 

 pared for. It is the bare prose of misery, the un- 

 heroic of tragedy. There is not one redeeming or 

 mitigating feature. 



Kailway traveling in Ireland is not so rapid or so 

 cheap as in England. Neither are the hotels so 

 good or so clean, or the fields so well kept, or the 

 look of the country so thrifty and peaceful. The 

 dissatisfaction of the people is in the very air. Ire- 

 land looks sour and sad. She looks old, too, as do 

 all those countries beyond seas, — old in a way that 



