FLORIDA AND THE WEST INDIES 3 



slips over the bar just after low water and heads 

 for the ocean. Noblesse oblige ! Caronia pays the 

 price of greatness and is forced to anchor off New 

 Brighton for the flood. 



Thanks to this and to another delay through 

 fog, she reaches Queenstown ten hours late, and 

 here a couple of tenders discharge emigrants into 

 the steerage. Ireland is evidently not parting with 

 the most comely of her daughters or the most 

 sober of her sons. Yet such are the openings for 

 brain and brawn in the new lands of the West, that 

 these tousled colleens, with draggled hair and fear- 

 ful petticoats, may live to mother millionaires, and 

 necks that to-day reveal bones may yet shine 

 plump beneath a king's ransom in diamonds. 

 These reeling exiles, who wave unsteady farewell 

 to their friends on the tender, may control Trusts. 

 To-day, they are half-starved ; but the time may 

 come for them to corner wheat and starve their 

 fellows. Those squalling brats, who, this sharp 

 April evening, cower shivering against threadbare 

 mothers, will in all probability be drinking cham- 

 pagne at the Savoy while we others still content 

 ourselves with small beer at the village inn. Even 

 those who do not at the last attain to such dizzy 

 heights of refreshment, need nevermore know the 

 privations of life in lovely Connemara. I met an 

 Irishman in New York City. He wore a frock 

 coat and silk hat and ate his four meals a day. 

 He admitted that there were times when he 

 sickened for a sight of a sweet and dirty village 

 near Cork, but, he added, his yearnings, even 

 after twenty years of strenuous exile in a land of 

 bondage, were tempered by the recollection that 



