AN English person in Ireland may find himself astray because he will have no clue to the minds of the people. I once heard two English ladies returning from an Irish trip say to each other across a railway-carriage, otherwise full of Irish people, that the Irish all told lies. This was a rash judgment and a harsh one; I do not know what the occasion of it was. Sometimes the Irish, through their naturally gracious manners, will say the thing that will please you best to hear rather than the absolute truth by rule of thumb. There is the well-known, well-founded complaint about Irish distances; a peasant will tell you that you are three miles from a place when you are really seven. Now, of course you may be misled by the difference between the Irish and English mile; and thereby hangs a tale. The Irish or Plantation measure was adopted by Cromwell’s planted English, so that they might get a bigger slice of land than was intended for them. But if you are told you have three Irish miles to go and find that you have seven, almost certainly the thought uppermost in your misinformant’s mind was: “The crathur! Sure, he’ll think nothin’ of it if he believes it’s only three miles; and the spring ’ud be taken out of him altogether if he thought he’d seven weary miles before him yet. And, sure, by the time he’s travelled the three miles he won’t be far off the seven.”

The Irish mind, besides being very nimble, is subtle and complicated. It may have gone off on an excursion before answering you which you in your Anglo-Saxon plainness would never dream of; and your truth may not be the Irish truth at all, and yet both of them be the genuine article.

A very small Irish boy of my acquaintance, being rudely accused of having told a lie, responded meekly: “I don’t think it were really a lie; I think it were only an imagination.”

“Are there any priests in the town?” you ask an Irishman; and he replies, there being some half-dozen: “The streets are black with them.”

“You can’t always depend on eggs, not if they comes in fresh from the nest,” said an Irish servant to me, when some of the grocer’s “new-laid” eggs had “popped” in the saucepan. The remark was purely consolatory and was not at all intended to convey that the hens laid stale eggs.

The Irish “bull,” so-called, very often is the result of the nimble-wittedness of the speaker. He has thought more than he has expressed, and the bull implies a hiatus. “I’d better be a coward for ten minutes than be dead all my life” is a famous example of an Irish bull; but it only means “all the days of my natural life”; so much was not expressed.

My harsh critics of the London and North-Western express would doubtless have found the soft, flattering ways of the Irish false and hypocritical. One remembers the famous compliment, “No matter what age you are, ma’am, you don’t look it,” and the historical compliment of the Irish coal-porter to one of the beautiful Gunnings: “Sure, I could light my pipe by the fire of her eye.”

Sometimes a compliment or a wheedling good wish will take a sudden turn. “May the blessin’ of God go afther you!” says an Irish beggar—“may the blessin’ of God go afther you!” The desired alms not being forthcoming, the blessing flows naturally into—“and never overtake you.”

The beggars are great wits, of a sardonic kind usually. A rather short friend of mine walking with his tall sister, the two were importuned fruitlessly by a beggar-woman. Before they passed out of hearing she called gently to the lady: “Well, there you go! And goodness help the poor little crathur that hadn’t the spirit to say no to you.” This double insult to the supposed husband and wife was very neat.

A matter-of-fact young sister of mine, having been begged from by a ragged woman with a string of ragged children at one end of the village, was importuned at the other end by a man, similarly accompanied, whom she took rightly to be the woman’s mate. “We’re poor orphans,” whined the second string of children; “our poor mother’s dead and buried.” “I don’t believe it,” she said; “I met your mother at the other end of the village.” “Take no notice of her, childer,” said the man sorrowfully. “It wouldn’t be right to touch a penny of her money. She’s an unbeliever—that’s what she is.”

An old beggar-man, to whom I explained apologetically that I was without my purse, looked at me benevolently. “Never mind!” he said; “you’d give it if you had it, wouldn’t you? But there’s one thing I want to tell you: your dog’s gone home without you.” I don’t quite know how it was meant, but it conveyed to me a sense of well-meaning failure and inefficiency generally.

The salutations in Ireland used to be delightful. I hope it may be long before they are out of date. “God save you kindly,” was the salutation on the roadside. “God save all here!” you said, entering a house. And if any work was in progress, you said: “God bless the work!” If they were churning in the kitchen as you entered it, with the old up-and-down dasher or “dash,” as I knew it, you took a few turns with the dash lest you should carry off the butter. Butter and milk are things often charmed away. When I was a young girl, there was at Lucan, in the county Dublin, a fairy doctor, who was called in if the cows weren’t milking well, or the butter didn’t come to the churn, or if the beasts were ailing. A more Christian thing was to bring the live-stock to the priest to be blessed, or to bring the priests to the field to bless them, which is done every year. Even the Orangeman of the North, if he has a cow ailing, thinks it not amiss to ask for the priest’s blessing. All the same, the Irish Celts, in their superstitions, have a way of rounding on their good friends, the priests. Priests’ marriages—that is, marriages arranged by the priests—are proverbially unlucky. And to buy the priest’s cow in a fair is notoriously unlucky for the general dealing of the day, as well as that particular one.

The freedom of the people with their superiors is often a stumbling-block to the stranger; while to the Irish man or woman the division between classes in England will seem strange and unnatural—inhuman almost. “That’s an elegant new trousers you have on, Master John,” I heard an apple-woman by the kerb say to a young gentleman. The intimacy is not at all presumptuous; very far from it. Indeed, Irish people coming to live in England often blunder into treating their inferiors with the easy intimacy of the life at home, only to find that it is neither desired nor expected.

Irish servants of the old class were retainers and very much devoted to the families they lived with. The conditions were strange and difficult to those not accustomed to them. You would find a family of the gentry of the lowest Low Church on terms of tender affection with its Papistical servants and with the neighbouring peasants. They would have told you as abstract facts that Home Rule would mean the massacre of the Protestants, and that already their lands and properties were partitioned in the secret councils of whatever League happened to be uppermost at the moment. It would be an article of their creed that the priests were accountable for all the troubles of Ireland. They would have consented generally to the axiom that no Irish Papist told the truth. Yet they would always exempt their own servants, and perhaps their own tenants, and would fly at you as being anti-Irish if you suggested a flaw in the Irish character, or even an excellency in the English, which is almost as bad, if not quite. There are families of Irish gentlefolk come down in the world whose servants, having feasted with them, starve with them. One such servant I knew who managed the whole finances of the family, and laid out the few coins to the greatest advantage, allotting the supplies with a carefulness which must have been bitter to her Irish heart. If the family lived too well at the beginning of the week, it must go hungry at the end.

In an Irish house the young ladies and gentlemen are very often found in the kitchen, not in pursuit of the housewifely virtues, but for social reasons. The kitchen-fire is the best “to have a heat by.” The cook will rake out the ashes and make the fire bright for Master Rody or Miss Sheila to warm their feet by; and in the kitchen Irish children of the gentle class get filled to the lips with the peculiarly awful ghost-stories of the Celt, with old songs and charms and folklore of one sort or another; sometimes, too, with old legends and stories which make young rebels of the children of the garrison and perhaps old rebels as well. There is no nurse so warm and comfortable as a good Irish nurse, as the little children of the Irish nobility and gentry—invading or planted families, very often—found, drawing life from an Irish breast, and wrapped up in a comfortable Irish embrace from all ghosts and hobgoblins.

I remember the young daughter of very Evangelical gentlepeople in Ireland who used to spend her Sunday afternoons, with the full knowledge of her parents, seated on the kitchen-table reading Papistical newspapers to the servants, whom she adored, and who adored her with at least an equal warmth. Her gold watch was the gift of one old servant; and on the eve of her marriage to a London curate she found pinned to her pincushion an envelope containing a five-pound note—“For my darling Miss Biddy, from Mary Anne.”

It has always seemed to me that the tie is closer and tenderer between the Irish Catholic servant and the Protestant gentry than when the employers are also of the old religion. It is certain that in the burning of Scullabogue Barn, and at the Bridge of Wexford, during the Rebellion, Catholic servants perished with their Protestant employers.

The tender concern that may be shown for you by an Irish person of whom you ask the way will stir you to wonderment. “Is it permissible to walk on the sea-wall?” a friend of mine asked of an Irish policeman. “Sure it is; but I wouldn’t do it if I was you. It ’ud be terrible cowld,” was the reply. “I wouldn’t walk it if I was you,” you may be answered when you ask how far a place is; “you wouldn’t be killin’ yourself—now, would you?”

When ladies first rode the bicycle in Ireland they excited different emotions, according to the character of the looker-on. “What would the blessed saints in heaven think of you?” the old women used to call out; but one old man had only compassion for the female cyclist. “God help yez,” he said; “’tis killin’ yourselves yez’ll be with them little wheely things, bad luck to them!”

You will find the soft, insinuating ways in a shop when you make a purchase or mean to make one. “It looks lovely on you,” a shop-assistant will say, with an air of being dispassionate. “Can you send this home to-night?” you ask, having concluded your purchase. “Sure, why not?” If you are English-born and bred, you will be at a loss to say why not.

A policeman in Dublin will direct you: “You take that turn over there, an’ you go along till you meet a turn on your left, but you’ll take no notice of that; you’ll keep straight on, and there’ll be another turn, but you’ll take no notice of that. An’ after that, you’ll come to a third turn, an’ you’ll take notice of that, for that’s the street you’re after.”

I recognized a countryman of my own in London when I asked a policeman the way and demurred from his instructions, remarking that I had been told to approach by a different way. “Sure you can, if you like,” he said, looking at me with his head on one side, “but I wouldn’t if I was you; it ’ud be a terrible long way round.”

An Irishman will always agree with you if he can—or even if he can’t. It is the Irish politeness. If you were to say to him, “Three years ago to-day I had as bad a cold as ever I had in my life,” he will say, “To be sure you had; I remember it well. ’Twas a terrible dose of a cowld, all out.” This makes the Irish a very agreeable people to live with if you have not offended them.

There are one or two virtues, not of the shining sort, which are hardly virtues at all, but rather vices to the Irish. Thrift is one of these. Another is its cousin, punctuality. No Irishman holds punctuality in honour. Irish time is twenty-five minutes later than English time and takes a deal longer than that to come up with English time. Any time at all will do for an Irishman. “Punctuality is the thief of time” is one of his axioms. Above all things, he despises punctuality about meal-times, and this, I know, will wring an Englishman’s withers. An Irish meal is served whenever it is ready; and if it is never ready at all, the Irishman will take a snack when he feels he really wants it. No Irishman is ill-tempered because his meals are late. He prides himself on his indifference to food as one of the things that set him apart from the unspiritual Saxon. You could hardly offend an Irishman more than by accusing him of having a hearty appetite. His meals are all movable feasts. Oddly enough, the Anglo-Irishman is quite as unpunctual as the Celt, if not more so. He assimilates the ways of the Celt, while the Celt remains untouched by his. The Anglo-Irishman is often as good a trencherman as his English brother, but he would never think of disturbing the machinery of Irish life so far as to expect his dinner at a given time. I have been asked to dine in Dublin and have arrived punctually, only to find the tradesmen’s carts delivering the dinner; and, having grown accustomed to English ways, I have made a frantic effort to arrive at the appointed hour for a luncheon-party, only to find the hostess lying down with toothache, and the drawing-room fire still unlit.

To be sure, you may arrive at a house at any hour of the day in Ireland and fall in for a meal. If you arrive at a time within at all measurable distance of meal-time, you shall not go forth unfed, although you be press-ganged to stay. I shall never forget the horror of my Irish friends when they heard that one was allowed to leave an English house with the dinner-bell in one’s ears. “It must be an awful country,” they said; then, detecting something of guilt, perhaps, in my air, they ventured: “But that wouldn’t happen in an Irish house—not in yours.” When I confessed that it had happened in mine they changed the subject. If they had allowed themselves to speak, they would have said too much.

I know an Irishman settled in England—a North of Ireland, that is to say a Scotch-Irishman, and a man of business—who always has the motor round for a spin as soon as the dinner-bell rings. He cannot keep his English servants, and is grieved at their perversity, which would keep him chained to a hot dining-room on an ideal evening for a motor-run. His guests stay their hunger with sherry and biscuits while they await his return.