FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 221 



Railway travelling in Ireland is not so rapid or so 

 cheap as in England. Neither are the hotels as good 

 or as clean, or the fields so well kept, or the look of 

 the country so thrifty and peaceful. The dissatisfac- 

 tion of the people is in the very air. Ireland looks 

 sour and sad. She looks old, too, as do all those coun- 

 tries beyond seas, old in a way that the American is a 

 stranger to. It is not the age of nature, the unshaken 

 permanence of the hills through long periods of time, 

 but the weight* of human years and human sorrows, as 

 if the earth sympathized with man and took on his at- 

 tributes and infirmities. 



I did not go much about Dublin, and the most char- 

 acteristic thing I saw there were those queer, uncom- 

 fortable dog carts, a sort of Irish bull on wheels, with 

 the driver on one side balancing the passenger on the 

 other, and the luggage occupying the seat of safety be- 

 tween. It comes the nearest to riding on horseback, 

 and on a side-saddle at that, of any vehicle travelling I 

 ever did. 



I stopped part of a day at Mallow, an old town on 

 the Blackwater, in one of the most fertile agricultural 

 districts of Ireland. The situation is fine, and an 

 American naturally expects to see a charming rural 

 town planted with trees and filled with clean, comforta- 

 ble homes ; but he finds instead a wretched place, 

 smitten with a plague of filth and mud, and offering but 

 one object upon which the eye can dwell with pleasure, 

 and that is the ruins of an old castle, " Mallow Castle 



