Be it ever so shabby and dismal, nobody ever owns to keeping a shop. A
fellow whose stock in trade is a penny roll or a tumbler of lollipops,
calls his cabin the 'American Flour Stores,' or the 'Depository for
Colonial Produce,' or some such name.
As for Inns, there are none in the country; Hotels abound as well
furnished as Mulholliganville; but again there are no such people as
landlords and land-ladies; the landlord is out with the hounds, and my
lady in the parlour talking with the Captain or playing the piano.
If a gentleman has a hundred a year to leave to his family they all
become gentlemen, all keep a nag, ride to hounds, and swagger about
in the 'Phaynix,' and grow tufts to their chins like so many real
aristocrats.
A friend of mine has taken to be a painter, and lives out of Ireland,
where he is considered to have disgraced the family by choosing such
a profession. His father is a wine-merchant; and his elder brother an
apothecary.
The number of men one meets in London and on the Continent who have a
pretty little property of five-and-twenty hundred a year in Ireland
is prodigious: those who WILL have nine thousand a year in land when
somebody dies are still more numerous. I myself have met as many
descendants from Irish kings as would form a brigade.
And who has not met the Irishman who apes the Englishman, and who
forgets his country and tries to forget his accent, or to smother the
taste of it, as it were? 'Come, dine with me, my boy,' says O'Dowd, of
O'Dowdstown: 'you'll FIND US ALL ENGLISH THERE;' which he tells you with
a brogue as broad as from here to Kingstown Pier.
Pages:
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102