THE village of Bantry, in County Cork, some forty miles from Cork, is owned and controlled by My Lord Bantry, who is, or, at least, ought to be, one of the richest men in Ireland. Whether he is or not depends entirely upon how expensively he lives in Paris, and how much extravagance he commits there and in London. He certainly screws enough money out of the unfortunates born upon the land stolen from them by English Kings and given to him, to make him a richer man than Rothschild, if he has taken care of it. But I don’t suppose he has. Probably the magnificent estate, robbed from the people, is mortgaged to its full value, and he supports himself by keeping his so-called tenants down to a point, in food, shelter, and clothes, that a Camanche Indian would turn up his nose at. Indeed, were the most degraded Piute compelled to accept life on the terms that My Lord Bantry imposes upon the men he robs, he would paint his face, sing his death song, go out and kill somebody, and die with great pleasure.

Bantry is a pleasant village; that is, some of its streets are pleasant, and it has the most beautiful bay on the coast. Sailing across the most lovely body of water I have ever seen, is the famous watering place, Glengariff, which is the most delicious spot of land in the world. And Bantry itself has much in its favor, all marred by the abject poverty of nine-tenths of its inhabitants.

Leaving the main street, which is, like all the streets of Irish villages, made up of small stores, or shops, as they are called, you walk up a rather steep hill, pass through a crooked street, and you find yourself in the midst of the regulation Irish cabins.

Miserable structures of stones piled one upon the other, not even daubed with plaster, with no windows, as a rule, though the more pretentious ones have a single pane of glass in the wall somewhere. However, as that pane is almost invariably broken, its principal use is the extra ventilation it affords.

The cabin is the same size as those on farms, say from ten to twelve feet wide by fifteen or sixteen in length. In the country, however, they do have the space above, to the thatched roof, but land is more valuable in the villages, and My Lord Bantry’s expenses in London and Paris are enormous. He must get more money out of the villagers, and he makes two stories out of the wretched hovel, and by crowding in two families makes double rent. The first floor is not above five feet six inches in height, and the upper is a good foot shorter. In neither floor can an ordinary man stand upright.

We went up the miserable stairs in one of them, and gained the still more miserable den above. It was more like a coffin than a room, and the idea of a coffin was brought forcibly to the mind as you glanced at the wretched occupants. On a miserable bed of dried leaves, covered with potato sacks on the one side, was the emaciated form of a man dying of starvation and consumption. He had about forty-eight hours of life in him. Upon my word I felt happy to see he was so near death. For having an excellent reputation, having always been a good man, he is certain to go, after death, where there would not be the slightest possible chance of meeting My Lord Bantry or his agent. In the other corner was a flat stone, upon which a consumptive fire of peat was burning, the smoke filling the room. Huddled around this fire were five children, under the watchful eye of a very comely woman. The children were barefooted and stockingless, and clad in the most deplorable rags, while the mother, also barefooted, was clothed in the regular cotton slip, without a particle of underclothing of any kind or description. And into that garret, poor as it was, came other women, not clothed sufficiently to be decent, to boil their potatoes at the wretched fire. They have a practice of exchanging fires in this way, that none shall be wasted.

“What do you pay for this apartment?”

“Ten-pence a week, sor!”

“Are you in arrears for rent?”

“Yis sor. He (pointing to her husband) has been sick, sor, for months, sor, and cud not worruk.”

“What will you do if he dies?”

“We shall be put out, sor.”

This with no burst of anguish, with no special tone of anger or manifestation of emotion. To be “put out” is the common lot of the Irish laborer, and Irish wife, and they expect it.

And within a mile of that wretched spot, of that dying man and starving children, My Lord Bantry has a most beautiful castle, luxurious furniture, filled with pampered flunkies, his stable crowded with the most wonderful horses, and his table groaning under the weight of the luxuries of every clime.

Surely, not for ten pence a week will he tear this woman from the side of her dead husband, and throw her, with her helpless children, out into the cold and wet street?

Yes, but he will, though!

For this family is but one of many thousands on the land which a bad King stole from the people who owned it. Were this the only case he might relent; but should he do it in this case he would have to do it for others, and ten pence a week from thousands aggregates a very large sum, and My Lord Bantry’s expenses are very high, for it costs money to run a castle, and there is his house in London, his house in Paris, and his house in Rome, and his houses the Lord knows where; and then his yacht is rather expensive, as his officers and men must be paid, to say nothing of the larder and wines necessary to entertain his friends; and then there is the terrible expense of entertaining his friends from London during the shooting season, and occasional losses at play, and all that.

Clearly, the Widow Flanagan must either pay her rent or be pitched out into the street to make room for some other widow who can pay, for a while at least, and when she can’t pay there are others who can.

It is needless to add that there is in Bantry Bay a splendid English gunboat armed as in time of war, with burnished guns, with bombs of all sort of explosive power, rifled guns, which would knock poor Bantry into a cocked hat in ten minutes, with fine looking marines, armed to the teeth, which, with the military on shore, would make it very warm for the widow Flanagan and her friends, should they presume to interfere with My Lord’s land agent, and the bailiffs and the soldiers behind them. The widow has nothing to do but to bow her head and submit, and pray that some relief may come to her from somewhere. But where is it to come from? Not from My Lord, for, as I said, he has his private expenses to meet; not from his agent, for he was selected for his especial fondness for pitching women and children into the street; not from England, for England looks upon every country it has anything to do with as either to be plundered or traded with; not from the peasantry about them, for they are in the same boat with the widow.

What becomes of her finally, I don’t know. I am altogether too soft-hearted to stay any length of time where such things are to be seen every hour.

A pathetic little scene took place in the widow’s loft, which illustrates something of Irish character. As I said the husband and father was lying upon his wretched pallet, dying of consumption. The youngest but one of the children was the most beautiful child I have ever seen, a sweet little fairy, with long curly, blonde hair and black eyes, built from the ground up, and with a face that a painter would walk miles to sketch. She was a delicious little dream, a dainty bit of humanity. True, she had nothing but rags upon her delightful little figure, and true it was that her sweet little face was smeared with dirt, and her little hands were as grimy as grimy could be, and her little shapely bare legs were very red and somewhat pimply. But why not? Clothes cannot be had for the children when the father works for ten pence a day and is sick half the time, and nickel-plated bath-tubs and scented soap are not to be expected in the top of a cabin in which you cannot stand upright; and how can a child’s face be kept clean where there is no chimney, and where the room is so thick with peat smoke that you may almost cut it with a knife, and a child that never had a pair of shoes and stockings could hardly be expected to have white legs and feet. The cold prevents that.

In our party was an American gentleman, who was blessed with an abundance of boys, but no girls, and he and his wife had been contemplating the adoption of a girl. Here was an opportunity to secure not only a girl, but just the kind of a girl that he would have given half his estate to be the father of. And so he opened negotiations.

An Irishman who knew him, explained to the father and mother that the gentleman was a man of means, that his wife was an excellent, good woman, and that the child would be adopted regularly under the laws of the State in which he lived, and would be educated, and would rank equally with his own children in the matter of inheritance, and all that. In short, Norah would be reared a lady.

Then the American struck in. She, the mother, might select a girl to accompany the child across the Atlantic, and the girl selected should go into his family as the child’s nurse, and the child should be reared in the religion of its parents.

The father and mother consulted long and anxiously. It was a terrible struggle. On the one hand was the child’s advantage; on the other, paternal and maternal love.

Finally a conclusion was arrived at.

“God help me,” said the mother, “you shall have her. I know you will be good to her.”

Then the arrangements were pushed very briskly, and, with regular American business-like vehemence. The girl selected to act as nurse was the mother’s sister, a comely girl of twenty. The American took the child, and rushed out to the haberdasher’s, and purchased an outfit for her. He put shoes and stockings on her, which was a novel experience, and a pretty little dress, and a little hat with a feather in it, and a little sash, and all that sort of thing; and he procured shoes and stockings for the elder girl, and a tidy dress, and a hat and shawl, and so forth. And then he brought them back, instructing the mother that he should leave with them for Cork the next morning at eleven, and that the girl and the child should be dressed and ready to depart.

The next morning came, and the American went for his child. She was dressed, though very awkwardly. The mother had never had any experience in dressing children, and it was a wonder that she did not get the dress wrong side up. But there she was, and the mother wailed as one who was parting with everything that was dear to her, and the father lay and moaned, looking from Norah to the American. Time was up. The mother took the baby in her arms, and gave it the final embrace, and the long, loving kiss; the father took her in his arms, and kissed her; the other children looked on astounded, while the girl stood weeping.

“Good-bye!” said the American; “I will take good care of the baby,” and, taking her from the mother’s arms, he started for the door. There was a shriek—the woman darted to him just as he was closing the door, and snatched the baby from him.

“Drop the child!” said the father. “You can’t have her for all the money there is in Ameriky.”

“No, sor!” ejaculated the mother, half way between fainting and hysterics. “I can’t part wid her!”

And she commenced undressing the baby.

“Take back yer beautiful clothes—give me back the rags that was on her—but ye can’t have the child!”

And the girl—she commenced undressing, too; for she did not want to obtain clothes under false pretenses. But the American stopped the disrobing.

“It’s bad for the child,” he said, “but somehow I can’t blame you. You are welcome to the clothes, though.”

And he left as fast as he could, and I noticed he was busy with his handkerchief about his eyes for some minutes. And I am sorry to say he indulged in a very profane soliloquy, ’till he got out of the street, and his objurgations were not leveled at the father and mother.

What became of the clothes I know not, but I presume that, when the husband died and went where landlords cease from troubling and the weary are at rest, the widow pawned them to pay the rent, and save the dead body of her husband from being pitched into the street with herself and children; and that when My Lord Bantry saw her name on the list, as paid, he remarked:

“Ah! the Widow Flanagan has paid her rent. I thought she would! What is necessary with these Irish, is to be firm with them. By the way, is she paying enough?”

And after ascertaining that the wine had been properly frappÉd, he went to his dinner, and the gunboat, and the royal constabulary felt relieved.

It is a pleasant thing for all concerned to have the Widow Flanagan pay her rent promptly, and make no fuss about it, except, of course, for the Widow Flanagan. But she, being an Irish widow, is not to be considered. But if there is a God of justice and mercy, there will come a time when she will be considered, and then it will be made very warm for My Lord Bantry, his agent, the captain of the gunboat, the officers of the soldiery, and the whole brood of oppressors. There is a Court at which the Widow Flanagan can appear on equal terms with her landlord, but it is not in Ireland.

If I ever leaned toward the doctrines taught by the Universalists, a contemplation of the system of Bantryism has entirely and completely convinced me that they are erroneous. If there is not a lake of fire and brimstone, a very wide and very deep, and very hot one there ought to be, and when the British House of Lords meet there, there will always be a quorum. And My Lord will lift up his eyes to the widow Flanagan and beg for a drop of water to cool his parched tongue. But he won’t get it. He don’t deserve it.

It is impossible to make an American comprehend the width, depth and breadth of Irish misery until he has seen it with his own eyes. No other man’s eyes are good for anything in this matter, for the reason that nothing parallel exists this side of the water. And besides this the writers for the stage and of general literature have most woefully misrepresented the Irish man and woman, and very much to his and her disadvantage.

The Irishman of the stage and novel is always a rollicking, happy-go-lucky sort of a reckless fellow, with a short-tailed coat, red vest and corduroy trowsers, woolen stockings and stout brogans; with a bottle of whisky peeping out of his pocket, a blackthorn shillelah in his fist; always ready for a dance, or a fight, or for love-making, or any other pleasant employment. There is always on his head a rather bad hat, worn jauntily, however, and though he may be occasionally rather short of food, he manages always to get enough to be fat, sleek, and rosy. And then he always has a laugh on his face, a joke on his lips, and he goes through life with a perpetual “Hurroo.”

And Katy—she is always presented to us clad in a short woolen gown, her shapely legs enclosed in warm red stockings; and she had a bright red handkerchief about her neck, with good, comfortable shoes, and a coquettish straw hat—a buxom girl, who can dance down any lad within ten miles, and can “hurroo” as well as Pat, and a little better.

The Irish priest is always represented to us as a fat, sleek, jolly fellow, who is constantly giving his people good advice but who nevertheless is always ready to sing “The Cruiskeen Lawn,” in a “rich, mellow voice,” before a splendid fire in the house of his parishioners, with a glass of poteen in one hand and a pipe in the other, the company joining jollily in the chorus. He is supposed to live in luxury from the superstition of his people, and to have about as rosy a life as any man on earth.

All these are lies.

The Irishman is the saddest man on the surface of the globe. You may travel a week and never see a smile or hear a laugh. Utter and abject misery, starvation and helplessness, are not conducive of merriment.

The Irishman has not only no short-tailed coat, but he considers himself fortunate if he has any coat at all. He has what by courtesy may be called trowsers, but the vest is a myth. He has no comfortable woolen stockings, nor is he possessed of the regulation stage shoes. He does not sing, dance or laugh, for he has no place to sing, laugh and dance in. He is a moving pyramid of rags. A man who cuts bog all day from daylight to dark, whose diet consists of a few potatoes twice a day, is not much in the humor for dancing all night, even were there a place for him to dance in. And as for jollity, a man with a land agent watching him like a hawk to see how much he is improving his land, with the charitable intent of raising the rent, if by any possibility he can screw more out of him, is not in the mood to laugh, sing, dance or “hurroo.” One might as well think of laughing at a funeral. Ireland is one perpetual funeral. The ghastly procession is constantly passing.

There is unquestionably a vast fund of humor in the Irishman, which would be delightful could it have proper vent. You hear faint tones of it, as it is; but it is in the minor key, and very sad. It always has a flavor of rack-rent in it, a taste of starvation, a suggestion of eviction and death, by cold and hunger, on the road-side. It isn’t cheerful. I had much rather have the Irishman silent, than to hear this remnant of jocularity which is always streaked with blood.

TO MARKET AND BACK FOR SIXPENCE.