Penelope's Irish ExperiencesWiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
General
Penelope's Irish Experiences
Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
Ireland -- Fiction
It was small use for the parliamentary misrepresentatives to advise
treating Victoria of the Good Deeds with the courtesy due to a foreign
sovereign visiting the country. Under the miles of flags she drove, red,
white, and blue, tossing themselves in the sweet spring air, and up from
the warm hearts of the surging masses of people, men and women alike,
Crimean soldiers and old crones in rags, gentry and peasants, went a
greeting I never before heard given to any sovereign, for it was a sigh
of infinite content that trembled on the lips and then broke into a deep
sob, as a knot of Trinity College students in a spontaneous burst of
song flung out the last verse of 'The New Wearing of the Green.' [**]
'And so upon St. Patrick's Day, Victoria, she has said
Each Irish regiment shall wear the Green beside the Red;
And she's coming to ould Ireland, who away so long has been,
And dear knows but into Dublin she'll ride Wearing of the Green.'
** Alfred Perceval Graves.
The first cheers were faint and broken, and the emotion that quivered
on every face and the tears that gleamed in a thousand eyes made it the
most touching spectacle in the world. 'Foreign Sovereign, indeed!'
She was the Queen of Ireland, and the nation of courtiers and hero
worshippers was at her feet. There was the history of five hundred years
in that greeting, and to me it spoke volumes.
Plenty of people there were in the crowd, too, who were heartily 'agin
the Government'; but Daniel O'Connell is not the only Irishman who
could combine a detestation of the Imperial Parliament with a passionate
loyalty to the sovereign.
There was a woman near us who 'remimbered the last time Her Noble
Highness come, thirty-nine years back,--glory be to God, thim was the
times!'--and who kept ejaculating, “She's the best woman in the wurrld,
bar none, and the most varchous faymale!” As her husband made no reply,
she was obliged in her excitement to thump him with her umbrella and
repeat, “The most varchous faymale, do you hear?” At which he retorted,
“Have conduct, woman; sure I've nothin' agin it.”
“Look at the size of her now,” she went on, “sittin' in that grand
carriage, no bigger than me own Kitty, and always in the black, the
darlin'. Look at her, a widdy woman, raring that large and heavy family
of children; and how well she's married off her daughters (more luck to
her!), though to be sure they must have been well fortuned! They do
be sayin' she's come over because she's plazed with seein' estated
gintlemen lave iverything and go out and be shot by thim bloody Boers,
bad scran to thim! Sure if I had the sons, sorra a wan but I'd lave
go! Who's the iligant sojers in the silver stays, Thady? Is it the Life
Guards you're callin' thim?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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