Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (2 of 2): (2nd ed.) (1888)Hurlbert, William Henry
History
Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (2 of 2): (2nd ed.) (1888)
Hurlbert, William Henry
Ireland -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901
"There now, your honour, just look at that house! It's a magistrate he
is that lives there; and why? Why, just to be called 'your honour,' and
have the people tip their hats to him. Oh! he delights in that, he does.
Why, you might knock a man, or put him in the water, you might, indeed,
but if you came before Mr.----, and you just called him 'your honour'
often enough, and made up to him, you'd be all right! You've just to go
up to him with your hat in your hand, looking up at him, and to say,
'Ah! now, your honour'" (imitating the wheedling tone to perfection),
"and indeed you'd get anything out of him--barring a sixpence, that is,
or a penny!
"Ah! he's a snug one, too!" And with that he launched a sharp thwack of
the whip at the grey mare, and we went rattling on apace.
At the very pretty station of Athy we parted the best of friends. "Wish
you safe home, your honour." The kindly railway porter, also, who had
recommended Kavanagh's Hotel, was anxious to know how I found it, and so
busied himself to get me a good carriage when the train came in, that I
feel bound to exempt Athy from the judgment passed by Sir James
Allport's committee against the "amenities of railway travelling in
Ireland."
DUBLIN, _Saturday, March 10._--I called by appointment to-day upon Mr.
Brooke, the owner of the Coolgreany estate, at his counting-house in
Gardiner's Row. It is one of the spacious old last-century houses of
Dublin; the counting-room is installed with dark, old-fashioned mahogany
fittings, in what once was, and might easily again be made, a
drawing-room. Pictures hang on the walls, and the atmosphere of the
whole place is one of courtesy and culture rather than of mere modern
commerce. One of the portraits here is that of Mr. Brooke's
granduncle--a handsome, full-blooded, rather testy-looking old warrior,
in the close-fitting scarlet uniform of the Prince Regent's time.
"He ought to have been called Lord Baltimore," said Mr. Brooke
good-naturedly; "for he fought against your people for that city at
Bladensburg with Ross."
"That was the battle," I said, "in which, according to a popular
tradition in my country, the Americans took so little interest that they
left the field almost as soon as it began."
Another portrait is of a kinsman who was murdered in the highway here in
Ireland many years ago, under peculiarly atrocious circumstances, and
with no sort of provocation or excuse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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