But the view from the window soon made us forget our fellow-passengers. The road runs for a time close beside the Flesk, one of the prettiest of Irish rivers, while away to the south rose the beautiful Killarney hills, peak upon peak, with mighty Mangerton dominating all of them. And then came the Paps, two conical elevations separated by a deep ravine; and then the bleak brown slopes of the Muskerry hills, with a ruined castle of the McCarthys guarding the only pass into the valley. To the north a boggy plain stretched away and away, ridged with black pits, like long earthworks, from which the turf had been cut.

The hills to the south grew gradually less rugged, and presently we dropped into the beautiful valley of the Blackwater, with many ruined castles perched on the crags which overshadow it—castles built by the McCarthys, the O'Callaghans, and I know not what other septs, memorials of the old days of raid and counter-raid, of warring clans and treacherous chieftains.

And then we came to Mallow, and had to change into another carriage, where we found five Americans, who were also coming from Killarney, and who also believed that they had been held up. Their grievance was against the hotel at which they had stopped, and they said wildly that it was no better than a den of thieves. This, of course, was an exaggeration, and, in any event, I did not pity them much, for it was soon evident that their visit to Ireland had been a waste of time. They knew nothing of her history and traditions; her ruins held no meaning for them; her empty valleys told them nothing of her past; they had never heard of Cormac, or Finn the Fair, or Ossian, or Conn the Hundred Fighter, or even of Brian Boru; they had never heard of that old civilisation which the Danes swept away, and saw nothing very wonderful in the Cross of Cong or the Book of Kells. So to them Ireland had proved a disappointment, just as she will to every one who visits her in ignorance and indifference.

We reached Limerick Junction, at last, and changed thankfully to the branch which runs to Limerick, twenty miles away. And almost at once we came upon traces of Patrick Sarsfield, of glorious memory, for a few miles beyond the Junction, to the left of the line, are the ruins of a castle, which was held by the English, but which he surprised one night, on one of those famous raids of his, and captured and blew up. And then the line mounted the hills which divide the Vale of Tipperary from the valley of the Shannon, crossed them, and came out upon a land as beautiful and fertile as any we had seen in Ireland. Such lushness, such greenness, such calm, quiet loveliness can surely be matched in few other spots upon this earth.

It was still early afternoon when the train rolled in to the station at Limerick, and on the platform we met the actor and his wife whom we had talked with at Blarney a week before. They had come to Limerick, where their principal was a great favourite, for a three weeks' engagement. I saw the actor afterwards on the street, and he told me that the theatre was in terrible shape, for some misguided enthusiasts had attempted to hold a Unionist meeting there, a few days previously, and the patriotic Limerickians had nearly torn the place to pieces.

Limerick is by far the most important town of central or western Ireland; in fact it is surpassed in population only by Belfast, Dublin and Cork, and it has many amusing points of resemblance to the two latter. It is divided into two parts by a branch of the Shannon; it has one long, curving principal street leading to a bridge; the street is known officially as George Street, after an English king, but to all Irishmen it is O'Connell Street, in honour of the Liberator whose statue is its chief adornment; this street is a street of bright and attractive shops, not in itself interesting, but cross the bridge to the older part of the town, or turn up any of the little lanes which lead off from it, and you will find nothing more picturesque anywhere—nor more distressful.

We walked along George Street, that afternoon, and crossed the bridge to the island on which Limerick had its birth. The bridge is called Matthew Bridge, not after the Disciple, but after Ireland's great apostle of temperance. Beyond the bridge is a maze of narrow, crooked streets, and we made our way through them to the old cathedral, whose tower served as guide. We got there just as vespers were over, and we found the verger very willing to show us about.

I do not imagine there are many Protestants at Limerick; at least, a very small portion of this impressive old church serves the needs of the congregation, and the rest of it is bare and empty—and imposing. Rarely indeed have I seen a more sombre interior, for the walls are very massive, and the windows small, and there is a surprising number of dark little chapels—the principal one, of course, being dedicated as a burial place for the Earls of Limerick. The carved miserere seats are worth examining, as are also many of the old tombs which clutter the interior. There is an elaborate one to the Earl of Thomond in the chancel, and a carved slab covering the grave of Donall O'Brien, King of Munster, who founded the cathedral in 1179; but among the quaintest is a slab built into the wall of the nave with this epitaph cut upon it:

We spent a very pleasant half hour in the church, and then we wandered on through the crooked streets to the magnificent Norman castle, set up here to defend the passage of the Shannon. Most venerable and impressive it is, with its great drum towers, and curtains ten feet thick. Just in front of it the Shannon is spanned by a fine modern bridge, replacing the ancient one which was the scene of so many conflicts, and at the farther end of it, mounted on a pedestal, is the famous stone on which Sarsfield signed his treaty with the English in 1691—the treaty which guaranteed equal rights to Catholics, but which, as every Catholic Irishman somewhat too vividly remembers, resulted only in a more bitter persecution. Irish memory, curiously enough, seems always to grow clearer with the passing years, and the mists of two centuries accentuate, rather than obscure, the fame of Limerick as "The City of the Violated Treaty." The story runneth thus:

The River Shannon, with its wide estuary, its many lakes, and its mighty current flowing between impassable bogs or beetling cliffs, has always been a formidable barrier between east and west Ireland. In the old days, the only doors in this barrier was the ford at Athlone, just below Lough Ree, and another all but impassable one at Killaloe, just below Lough Derg; but in the ninth century, the Danes sailed up from the sea, landed on an island at the head of the tideway, fortified it, and so started the city of Limerick. The current of the river was divided here, and the invaders managed in time to get a bridge across, and so opened another door in the Shannon barrier. Brian Boru drove them out, at last, and then the Normans came and, after their fashion everywhere, rendered their hold secure by erecting a great round-towered castle to guard the bridge. Edward Bruce captured it in 1316, and three centuries later, Hugh O'Neill held it for six months against Cromwell's great general, Ireton. The Ironsides captured it, finally, and Ireton died of the plague not long afterwards in a house just back of the cathedral.

But it was in the war against William of Orange that Limerick played its most distinguished part. I have already told how the Irish chose the cause of the Stuarts against the Parliament; how they proclaimed Charles II king as soon as his father's head was off, and of the vengeance Cromwell took. So it was inevitable that they should espouse the cause of James II against the Protestant William, whom the English had called over from the Netherlands to be their king. James came to Ireland to lead the rebellion, proved himself an idiot and a coward, and ended by running away and leaving the Irish to their fate.

William's troops swept the country, took town after town and castle after castle, until Limerick remained nearly the last stronghold in Irish hands. So William marched against it, at the head of 26,000 men, but the position was a very strong one, and that ablest of Irish generals, Patrick Sarsfield, was in command of the town, and William was beaten back. The next year another great army under General Ginkle marched against the place, first capturing Athlone, and so getting across the river. A terrific attack was concentrated on the fortress guarding the bridge, a breach was made, the fort stormed, and the garrison put to the sword, only about a hundred out of eight hundred escaping across the other branch of the river into Limerick.

Sarsfield still held the town, but his men were disheartened by the loss of the castle. Ginkle, on the other hand, realised that to take the town would be no easy task. A truce was proposed, negotiations began, both sides were eager to end the war, and the result was that the famous Treaty of Limerick was signed by Ginkle and Sarsfield on the third day of October, 1691, on a stone near the County Clare end of the bridge over the Shannon.

There were twelve articles in the treaty, and some of them were kept—the one, for instance, permitting all persons to leave the country who wished to do so, and to take their families and portable goods along; but one was not kept, the most important one, perhaps, which provided that Irish Catholics should enjoy all the religious rights they possessed under Charles II, and that all Irish still in arms, who should immediately submit and take the oath of allegiance, should be secured in the free and undisputed possession of their estates. In a word, the price of peace was to have been a general indemnity and freedom of religious worship. It was not an excessive price, but it was never paid.

The Protestant colonists in Ireland protested in great wrath that they had been betrayed, and the Irish Parliament, which the colonists controlled, after a bitter fight, repudiated the treaty, or, at least, confirmed only so much of it as "consisted with the safety and welfare of his Majesty's subjects in Ireland," and passed a number of new laws aimed at Catholics, disqualifying them from teaching school, from sending their children abroad to be educated, from observing any holy day except those set apart by the Church of Ireland, and many others of the same sort, some of almost insane malignity. All this was, of course, quite unjustifiable, but "King Billy" seems to have been in no way responsible for it. In any event, it happened more than two centuries ago, all these laws have long since been repealed, and it seems absurd to keep their memory so fresh and burning.

One word more, and I am done with history. After the surrender of Limerick, Sarsfield and his men were given the choice of enlisting in William's army or leaving the country. They chose the latter, and went to France, where the last Catholic king of England had sought refuge. He, of course, was unable to maintain them, so they enlisted under the French king, Louis XIV, and formed the Irish Brigade, which was afterwards to become so famous, and in which, during the next fifty years, nearly half a million Irishmen enlisted, as the best means of avenging themselves on England. The part they played at Landen, at Barcelona, at Cremona, at Blenheim, at Ramilles, and finally at Fontenoy—all this is matter of history.

We crossed the bridge again, after a look at the treaty stone—which, enshrined on its lofty pedestal, is really a monument to English perfidy—passed the castle, and plunged into the crooked streets of "English Town," as this oldest part of Limerick is called, with its tall, foreign-looking, tumbledown houses—as picturesque a quarter as I have seen anywhere. For Limerick grew into an important city in the century following its capture by the English, and many wealthy people put up handsome town-houses, four or five stories high, with wide halls and sweeping stairs and beautiful doorways and tall windows framed in sculptured stone. It is these old houses which shadow the narrow lanes of "English Town," and they are all tenements now, for the well-to-do people—such of them as are left—have moved over to the newer, more fashionable, more sanitary quarter. No attempt is made to keep them in repair, and many of them have fallen down, leaving ragged gaps in the street. Others seem in imminent danger of falling, and the distressed look of the place is further heightened by the great fragments of the old walls which remain here and there.

This part of Limerick is on the island where the town started; the part just beyond the bridge which leads to the mainland is called Irish Town, and it, too, was once included in the city walls, a long stretch of which is still standing back of the ancient citadel. Here too, especially along the quay, are handsome houses, long since fallen from their high estate, and now the homes of the poorest of the poor, a family in every room. It is something of a shock to see these ragged and distressed people climbing the beautiful stairways, or sitting in the handsome doorways or leaning out of the carved windows, very much at home in the place which was once the abode of wealth and fashion, while the noisy play of dirty and neglected children echoes through the rooms which once rang with gentle laughter and impassioned toast.

Newtown-Pery, the newer part of the town, built on land reclaimed from the river by the Pery family, the Earls of Limerick, who still own it, contrasts strongly with the older part, for its streets are wide and straight and run regularly at right angles, and it is a bustling place, but quite without interest to the stranger. The houses are almost uniformly four stories high, and are built of a peculiar dark-brown brick, which makes them look much older than they really are. And down along the water-front are nearly a mile of quays, with floating docks and heavy cranes, and towering warehouses looking down upon them.

Time was when Limerick fondly hoped to become the greatest port in Ireland. She had every advantage—a noble situation on the broad estuary of the Shannon, up which ships from America could sail direct to her wharves—but in spite of great expenditures to improve her harbour facilities, not only did no new trade come, but such as she already had withered and withered, until to-day her tall warehouses are empty, her quays almost deserted, and in the broad expanse of the Shannon there are few boats except excursion steamers and pleasure yachts.

The cause of this decay? Irishmen assert that there is only one cause—unjust and discriminating laws passed by England to protect her own trade by destroying Irish industry. No doubt this is true; but these laws have been repealed for many years, and there is little evidence of the healthy revival of these industries anywhere in Ireland. Such revival as there is has been carefully fostered by various government agencies; there has been no great spontaneous revival, and perhaps there never will be. But it is a melancholy sight—the empty, decaying mills, the idle factories, the deserted warehouses, the ruined dwellings, which the traveller sees all up and down the land.

I went out for another stroll about the town, after tea, for I wanted to see the new Catholic cathedral, whose tall spire dominates the landscape for many miles around. And as I went, I could not but notice the impress the English have left on the names of the streets. The principal street, as I have said already, is George Street; then there is Cecil Street, and William Street, and Nelson Street, and Catherine Street, and George and Charlotte Quays opposite each other. There is one, however, named after a local celebrity whom all Irishmen should delight to honour—Gerald Griffin, an authentic poet, whose "Eileen Aroon" is one of the tenderest and most musical of lyrics.

Gerald Griffin Street is one of the most important in Limerick, and it is by it that one gains the cathedral, an impressive building, especially as to its interior, dimly lighted through high, narrow lancet windows. And here again one admires not so much the church itself, as the indomitable spirit which could undertake the task of building such an edifice in want-stricken Ireland.

The Sarsfield monument is in the cathedral square, a rampageous figure, charging with drawn sword off the top of a shaft of stone—perhaps the most ridiculous tribute to a great soldier and patriot to be seen anywhere on this earth. I, at least, have never seen any to match it, unless it be that imperturbable dandy, supposed to represent Andrew Jackson, who calmly doffs his chapeau from the back of a rearing horse in front of our own White House!

I walked on, after that, down toward the quays, along little lanes of thatched houses, and then back into the region of the old mansions, with their chattering women and sprawling children; and then, suddenly, I became aware of the girls.

Limerick, like Cork, is supposed to be famous for the beauty of its women, and the younger generation was out in force, that Sunday evening, rigged up in its best clothes, evidently ready for any harmless adventure. There were some nice-looking girls among them, no doubt of that, with bright eyes and red lips and glowing cheeks, and the advent of a stranger in their midst filled them with the liveliest interest, which they were at no pains to dissemble. I know nothing about the psychology of Irish girls, for I was not in a position to investigate or experiment; but while they are shy, at first, I should judge that most of them are not altogether averse to mild flirtation. The glance of their eye is not, perhaps, as fatal as Kate Kearney's, but it is very taking.

I wish I could say as much for the boys; but if there were any witty, invincible Rory O'Mores left in Ireland, I didn't see them. The Irish young man seems very different indeed from the light-hearted, audacious, philandering scapegrace so dear to Lover and Lever and scores of lesser poets, and once so familiar upon the stage. They are not forever breaking into song, they do not brim with sentiment, they are not, so far as I could judge, full of heroic emotions and high ambitions. In fact, they are quite the opposite of all that—matter-of-fact, humdrum, rather stupid.

Of course there are exceptions, and I was fortunate enough to meet one that very evening. I stopped in at a tobacconist's to get a paper, and fell into talk with the proprietor; and presently there entered a man who bought a pennyworth of tobacco, filled his pipe, and then remained for a word, seeing that I was a stranger. We were talking about Ireland, and in a very few minutes the newcomer had the centre of the stage.

O'Connell, journeyman tailor, so he introduced himself, and I wish I could paint a picture of him that would make him live for you as he lives for me. He was a faded little man, of indeterminate age, with a straw-coloured moustache and sallow skin, but his eyes were very bright, and before long his face was glowing with an infectious enthusiasm. His clothes were worn and shabby, but one forgot them as he stood there and talked—indeed they even lent a sort of dignity to his lean, nervous little figure.

First he told of how Cleeve, the big butter man, was trying to get the city to close the swing bridge over the Shannon, so that his heavy trams, which went about the country collecting milk, could cross it. To close the bridge would shut off permanently about four hundred yards of quay; but, so Cleeve argued, the quays were little used, and the town would never need that stretch above the bridge. But O'Connell did not believe it.

"'Tis true," he said, "that England with her cruel laws, has killed our trade and brought us all to want; 'tis true that we have no use for the quay at present. But all that will be changed when we get Home Rule. Then, sir, you will see our quays crowded with boats from end to end; you will see our mills and factories humming with life, you will see our warehouses piled with commodities from every quarter of the world. To shut off part of them, just because this bloated butter-maker wants it, would be a crime against the people of this town."

"How is all this to be brought about?" I asked.

"'Tis you Americans will be doing it, sir. The Irish in America, our brothers, God bless them, will rally to the ould land. Her children will come home to the Shan Van Vocht, once she is free of England. 'Tis them ones will set us on our feet again. They will be putting their money into our industries, till in the whole island there will be not an idle wheel or a smokeless chimney."

I told him I was afraid his dreams were too rosy; that the American Irish, like all other Americans, would be governed by dividends, not by sentiment, in the investment of their money. But nothing could shake his belief in the good time coming. I asked him what he thought of Ulster, and he laughed.

"The Protestants have nothing to fear from Home Rule," he said. "'Tis them will control this government. We Catholics are going to pick the best and strongest men in this island to man the ship, and there will be more Protestants than Catholics amongst them. We will need strong arms at the helm, and what do we care what their religion may be, if only they're good men and true? You're a Protestant, I take it, sir?"

"Yes," I said; "I am."

"And does that make me think any the less of you? Not a bit of it. 'Tis the same God we look at, only with different eyes."

"Not even that," I corrected; "with the same eyes—just from a different angle."

"You've said it, sir. I can't improve on that. Well then, what is it the Ulster men are afraid of? They say it's the priests. But how silly that is! Let them look back into history, and see what has happened when the priests interfered with things that did not concern them. In spiritual matters I bow to my priest; in everything else, I am independent of him. It is so with all Irishmen, and has always been. Do you remember what the great O'Connell said: 'I would as soon,' said he, 'take my politics from Stamboul as from Rome.' Do you remember what happened when Rome tried to prevent the Catholics of Ireland from contributing to the testimonial for the greatest patriot Ireland has ever had, Charles Stewart Parnell? But of course you don't. I'll just tell you. Why, sir, the whole country was on fire from end to end. 'Make Peter's Pence into Parnell's Pounds' was the battle-cry, and the money poured in like rain. Mr. Parnell's friends had hoped to raise fifteen thousand pounds for him. When they got the money counted at last, they had near forty thousand pounds. What do you think of that now?"

"I think it was fine," I said. "But why is it, then, Ulster is so frightened?"

"Ah, Ulster isn't frightened—it's just a lot of talk from people who live by talkin'. There's many Catholics who are against Home Rule, and there's many Protestants who are for it. They'll all be for it, after they've tried it a while. And we won't let the Protestants stay out—we can't afford to—we need them too much. Why, sir, our leaders have always been Protestants, and I'm thinking always will be."

"There was O'Connell," I reminded him.

"I have not forgotten him—I quoted him but a moment since; and 'tis true he was a great man and a true patriot. But he fell into grievous error when he chose Catholic emancipation, when he might have got Home Rule. What did Catholic emancipation mean to me and thousands like me? It meant just nothing at all. It meant that some Catholics of O'Connell's own class could hold jobs under government—that was all. The greatest man this island ever produced, sir, was a Protestant. I have mentioned him already; his name was Charles Stewart Parnell!"

I wish you could have seen his shining eyes and heard his quivering voice as he went on to tell me about Parnell; and how, after the scandal which ruined his life—a scandal prearranged, so many think, by his political enemies—he had come to Limerick to address a meeting, with death in his face and a broken heart in his eyes; and there had been some in the crowd that hissed him and pelted him with mud; and the little tailor, his chest swelling at the old glorious memory, told how he had been one of those who rallied around the stricken leader and beat the crowd back and got him safe away. There were tears in his eyes before he had ended.

"Ah, woman," he went on, "'twas not only Parnell you ruined then, it was ould Ireland, too! And not for the first time! Why, sir, 'twas because of a woman the British first came to this island. Troy had her Helen, as Homer tells, and so had Erin. 'Twas the same story over again. Dervorgilla the lady's name was, and she was the wife of Tiernan O'Rourke, Prince of Breffni, who had his fine castle on the beautiful green banks of Lough Gill. It was there that Dermot MacMurrough, King of Leinster, saw her, and after that no other woman would do for him. So he courted her in odd corners and whispered soft honeyed words into her ear; and she listened, as women will, and her head was turned by his flattery. One day her husband, who was a pious man, kissed her good-bye and started on a pilgrimage to St. Patrick's Purgatory in Lough Derg; and he was there nine days; and when he came back, what did he find? Ah, sir, Tom Moore has told it far better than I can:

I wish I could convey the tremor of the voice with which O'Connell, journeyman tailor, recited these silly lines. I can see him yet, standing there, one hand against his heart, his eyes straining up to the battlements from which no welcoming light gleamed. I can see the proprietor of the little shop, as he lounged against his counter, smiling good-naturedly. I can see the two or three other men who had drifted in, listening with all their ears.

And then O'Connell went on to tell how O'Rourke, finding his wife had fled with MacMurrough, appealed to his overlord, King Turlough O'Conor, and how the two of them so harassed MacMurrough that he was compelled to restore Dervorgilla to her husband and to flee to England, where he went to Strongbow and persuaded him to bring his Normans to Ireland to help him in his feud; and how Strongbow, once he got a firm grip on the land, refused to loosen it, and the curse of English rule had been on Ireland ever since.

I looked this story up, afterwards, and found that legend tells it much as O'Connell did, and it is probably true. But, just the same, it is hardly fair to lay the whole blame for Ireland's woes on Dervorgilla, for the Normans had been looking longingly across the Irish Sea years before MacMurrough fled to them, and would no doubt have crossed it, sooner or later, without an invitation. The tragic point of the story is that, as usual, the invader found the Irish divided and so unable to resist. We shall see the castle from which Dervorgilla fled, before our journey is done, and also the place where she lies buried, at Mellifont, in the valley of the Boyne.

The quotation from Tom Moore had turned my little tailor's thoughts toward poetry, and he asked if I knew this poem and that, and when I didn't, as was frequently the case, he would quote a few lines, or sing them, if they had been set to music.

"Of course you know 'To the Dead of Ninety-eight'?" he asked.

"Yes," I said; "but that is not Johnson's noblest poem. Do you know his 'Ode to Ireland'?"

"I do not," he answered. "Let us have it, sir."

How sorry I was that I couldn't let them have it, or didn't have a copy that I could read to them, for it is a stirring poem; I had to confess that I didn't know it, but I can't resist quoting one splendid stanza now—

"Have you heard Timothy Sullivan's 'Song from the Backwoods'?" he asked me finally, and when I said I never had, he sang it for the assembled company, and a splendid song I found it. Here it is:

As he went on with the song, the others in the shop warmed up to it and joined in the chorus so lustily that a crowd gathered outside; and the shopkeeper got a little nervous, fearing, perhaps, a visit from some passing constable, and he whispered in O'Connell's ear, when the song was done, and there were no more songs that evening.

But still we sat and talked and smoked and O'Connell told me something of himself: of the fifteen shillings a week he could earn when he had steady work; of the three-pence a week he paid out under the insurance act, and how, if he was sick, he would draw a benefit of ten shillings a week for six months. He said bitterly that, if he lived in England, he would get free medical attendance, too, but that had been refused to Ireland through the machinations of the doctors and their friends. He told of the blessing the old age pension had been to many people he knew, and he admitted that England had been trying, of late years, to atone for her old injustices toward Ireland, and was now, perhaps, spending more money on the country than she got out of it.

"But there is a saying, sir, as you know," he concluded, rising and knocking out his pipe, "that hell is paved with good intentions; and however good England's intentions may be, she can never govern us well, because she can never understand us. Besides, it's not charity we want, it's freedom. Better a crust of bread and freedom, than luxury and chains! We'll have some hard fights, but we'll win out. Come back in ten years, sir, and you'll see a new Ireland. Take my word for it. It's glad I am that I came in here this night," he added. "I was feeling downcast and disheartened; but that is all over now. This talk has been a great pleasure to me. Good-bye, sir; God save you!" and he disappeared into the night.