  The Joys of Third-Class Travel IN Ireland, if you wish to travel third class, it is well to get into a carriage marked "non smoking." If there is no sign on it it is a smoking compartment, quite probably, the custom here being often the direct opposite of that in Great Britain. If you are traveling with women in the party the second class is advisable, but the third has this advantage—it saves you money that you can spend on worthless trinkets that may be confiscated by our customs house officers. I have been ten days in the north of Ireland and I met my first drunken man in a third-class carriage. Will the W. C. T. U. kindly make a note of this? Allow me to repeat for He was in a third-class smoking compartment, and in my hurry to make my train I stepped in without noticing the absence of the sign. He was a very old and rather nice-looking, clean-shaven man, and his instincts were for the most part of the kindliest, but he would have irritated Charles Dickens exceedingly, for he was an inveterate spitter, of wonderful aim, and, like the beautiful lady in the vaudeville shows whose husband surrounds her with knives without once touching her, I was surrounded but unharmed. When the old man saw my straw hat a gleam of interest came into "Are ye a Yankee?" said he. I assured him that I was. "I thought so be your hat, but you don't talk like a Yankee." So I handed him out a few "by Goshes," which he failed to recognize and told me plainly that he doubted my nationality. Except for my hat I was no Yankee. Now my hat was made in New York, but I knew that this was a subtlety that would pass him, so I again proclaimed my nationality, and he asked me with great politeness if I objected to his smoking (keeping up his fusillade all the time) and I with polite insincerity told him that I didn't. For his intentions were of the kindliest. I believe he would have stopped spitting if I had asked him to, but I hated to deprive so old a man of so quiet a pleasure. The talk now turned to the condition of Ireland, and he told me in his maudlin, thickly articulated way that Ireland was on the eve of a great industrial revival. As I had repeatedly heard this from the lips of perfectly sober people I believed it. I told him that he would live to see a more prosperous Ireland. Geese in Galway This he refused to believe and once more asked me if I was as American as my hat. I assured him that perhaps I was even more so and that his grandchildren would surely live to see Triumphant Ireland. This he accepted gladly, and coming to his place of departure, bade me kindly farewell, and stumbled over his own feet out of the compartment. And I immediately changed to one where smoking was not allowed. It was on the same journey that I stopped at a place called Omagh, and while waiting for a connection we were at the station some time. I was reading, but suddenly became conscious that some young people were having a very happy time, for peal after peal of laughter rang "How pleasant a thing it is," thought I, "that by the mere exhibition of the face nature gave me in America I can amuse perfect strangers in a far-off land," and I smiled benignantly at the young women, which had the effect of nearly sending them into hysterics. Life was a little darker for them after the train pulled out, but I could not stay in Omagh for the mere purpose of exciting their risibles by the exposition of my gloomy features. Everywhere I go I am a marked man. At Enniskillen I went for a walk with this young engine driver and we passed two pretty young girls, of whom he inquired the way to the park. It seems that the young women were on their way there themselves and they very obligingly showed us how to go. It occurred to the gallant young Californian that such an exhibition of kindliness was worth rewarding, and he asked the ladies if they did not care to stroll through the park. They, having nothing else to do and the evening being fine, consented, and we made a merry quartette. I have been somewhat disappointed in Nor should it be imagined for a moment that they were of that sisterhood so deservedly despised by that estimable and never to be too well thought of Mrs. Grundy—they were simply working girls who were out for an evening stroll and who saw in a chance conversation with representatives of the extreme east and west of America an opportunity for mental improvement. They were, it may be, unconventional, but how much more interesting are such people than those whose lives are ordered by rule. We left the young women in the park But Ireland has a well-earned reputation for a certain thing, which the just published table of vital statistics for the year 1906 goes far to strengthen. In the morning the young locomotive pusher and myself had attended a cattle show at Enniskillen fair grounds. I don't mind saying that I had stayed over a day in order to go to the fair, for I have not read Irish literature for nothing, and I was perfectly willing to see a fight and ascertain the strength of a shillelagh as compared with a Celtic skull. It was a great day for Enniskillen and for the Enniskillen Guards, who were out in force. There were also pretty But—what a disappointment. Irishmen? Why, you'll see more Irishmen any pleasant day below Fourteenth Street in New York. And those that were there were so painfully well behaved and quiet. And as for speaking the Irish dialect—well, I wish that some of the Irish comedians who have been persuaded that Irishmen wear green whiskers would come over here and listen to Irishmen speak. They wouldn't understand them, they speak so like other people. For ginger and noise and varied interests any New England cattle show has this one beaten to a pulp—if one may use so common an expression in a newspaper. The noisiest things there were the bulls, and they were vociferous and huge. But the men were soft spoken and there seemed little of the "Well, I swan! I There was just one man selling what must have been mock oranges, for such mockeries of oranges I never saw. They were the size of peaches and the engineer told me they were filled with dusty pulp. I bought none. The racing and fence jumping in the afternoon were interesting, but there was no wild Yankee excitement on the part of the crowd and no hilarity. There was only one man that I noticed as having taken more than was necessary, and the only effect it had on him was to unlock the flood gates of an incoherent eloquence One venerable-looking man, with a flowing white beard of the sort formerly worn by Americans of the requisite years, fell from a fence where he was viewing the jumping and was knocked out for a time. He had been "overcome by the heat," at which, out of respect to him, I took off my overcoat. The Irish idea of heat is different from the New York one. The splendid old fellow had served thirty-three years on the police force and had been a police pensioner for thirty-one years, and as he must have been twenty-one when he joined the force he was upwards of eighty-five. Would Edward Everett Hale view a race from a picket fence? There is something in the Irish air conducive to longevity. In the evening I saw the old man standing in the doorway of a A local tradesman told me that in the town of Enniskillen where formerly any public gathering was sure to be followed by a public fight, he had seen the Catholic band and the Orangemen's band playing amicably the same tune (I'll bet it wasn't "The Wearing of the Green"), as they marched side by side up the main street. The world do move. |
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