Penelope's Irish ExperiencesWiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
General
Penelope's Irish Experiences
Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
Ireland -- Fiction
Dr. La Touche is grey for his years, tall and spare in frame, and there
are many lines of anxiety or thought in his forehead; but a wonderful
smile occasionally smooths them all out, and gives his face a rare
though transient radiance. He looks to me as if he had loved too many
books and too few people; as if he had tried vainly to fill his heart
and life with antiquities, which of all things, perhaps, are the most
bloodless, the least warming and nourishing when taken in excess or as
a steady diet. Himself (God bless him!) shall never have that patient
look, if I can help it; but how it will appeal to Salemina! There are
women who are born to be petted and served, and there are those who seem
born to serve others. Salemina's first idea is always to make tangled
things smooth (like little Broona's curly hair); to bring sweet and
discreet order out of chaos; to prune and graft and water and weed and
tend things, until they blossom for very shame under her healing touch.
Her mind is catholic, well ordered, and broad,--for ever full of other
people's interests, never of her own: and her heart always seems to
me like some dim, sweet-scented guest-chamber in an old New England
mansion, cool and clean and quiet, and fragrant of lavender. It has been
a lovely, generous life, lived for the most part in the shadow of other
people's wishes and plans and desires. I am an impatient person,
I confess, and heaven seems so far away when certain things are in
question: the righting of a child's wrong, or the demolition of a
barrier between two hearts; above all, for certain surgical operations,
more or less spiritual, such as removing scales from eyes that refuse
to see, and stops from ears too dull to hear. Nobody shall have our
Salemina unless he is worthy, but how I should like to see her life
enriched and crowned! How I should enjoy having her dear little overworn
second fiddle taken from her by main force, and a beautiful first
violin, or even the baton for leading an orchestra, put into her
unselfish hands!
And so good-bye and 'good luck to ye, Cork, and your pepper-box
steeple,' for we leave you to-morrow!
Chapter XI. 'The rale thing.'
'Her ancestors were kings before Moses was born,
Her mother descended from great Grana Uaile.'
Charles Lever.
Knockarney House, Lough Lein.
We are in the province of Munster, the kingdom of Kerry, the town of
Ballyfuchsia, and the house of Mrs. Mullarkey. Knockarney House is
not her name for it; I made it myself. Killarney is church of the
sloe-trees; and as kill is church, the 'onderhanded manin'' of 'arney'
must be something about sloes; then, since knock means hill, Knockarney
should be hill of the sloe-trees.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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