1936 On the Continent

utter sweetness of it yet.
    When an. Irishwoman looks on you, with a slow gentle smile, spreading her soft lips wide, and the little elves of laughter crinkle up her blue grey eyes under their silky lashes, Ireland suddenly seems the pleasantest land on earth. And when her smile breaks into a laugh, the tiny rainbows come out and dance over the bog!
    They have great charm. I’ve tramped up and down the west of Ireland, summer and winter, and never met an ill-mannered Irishwoman yet; nor a man short of an answer. They have the most flexible wits.
Not a Punctual Nation
    Mind you, if you are a hide-bound, exact and punctual person, you will be exasperated a dozen times a day.
    They are a faithful people and curiously reliable, but there seems to be a lot more time in the west of Ireland than anywhere else in the world. Pleasant, sweet-scented time, full of the cry of sea birds and the scent of flowery woods. “Wasting time” ceases to be a crime, and becomes an impossibility: “Sure and how would you be doing the like of that? Will there not be plenty more time to-morrow?”
    I remember once, in my hot and bothered English way, urgently asking how far it was to the railway station. To which (not knowing which train I was after wanting to be catching) they pleasantly replied: “Sure how far were you wanting it to be?” It’s very seldom you get an Irishman flurried, and I’ve never seen one impatient yet.
Irish are Strong Workers—But—
    Then, too, the Irishman never seems to be working. He gets an enormous amount
done
, but it’s against his pride ever to be doing it.
    I’ve met men, with the sweat pouring off them, trying to shift the great stones that “grow” in the tiny rocky fields. They were all damp and breathless, but they were “notworking” they hastened to assure me, they were not even moving the rock; they were “only after seeing if it would removed be—”
    The Irish labourer is always just about to work, or is now “being destroyed entirely by the work he has been doing”—but never
working
; for sure if he was working he would not be having the time to talk wid you. (And an Irishman would find time to talk at his own funeral.) An American-Irishman was after explaining this matter very concisely. “If,” he said, “I was going to plough all Monday and it snowed, and I had to be threshing within the barn instead, I would be doing a bit of threshing but I wouldn’t be working because I was not ploughing—” and sure you can work alone but you can only talk with company.
Happy in Argument
    I believe there is the making of a lucrative clinic for the shy and silent and incurably tongue-tied in some village in the west of Ireland. The sufferer would only have to attend the evening gatherings to find himself lapped around in such a pleasant warmth of spontaneous conversation that his natural shyness would simply melt away. I defy anyone to listen to an Irish argument for five minutes without joining in.
    The speakers all produce such a mass of inappropriate data, they spread it abroad with such a cheerful lavish air and are so entirely convincing, when so completely wrong, that sure you are drawn into the talk before you’ve time to speak. And then they show such disarming deference to your own inaccuracies! The Englishman in argument is heavy, being pinned down by facts, but the Irishman is never pinned down by anything; and they have a way of seizing your data, in the middle, turning it wrong way up and handing it back as their own proof—that fairly lifts the ground from under your feet.
Good Training for Politicians
    It is not to be wondered that in the medieval days of discourse and argument the Irish held the learned universities of Europe spellbound.
    This convincing quality floored me completely upon the shores of Loch Mask.
    Old proceedings of the Royal Society had mentioned a sea monster, the equivalent of the Loch Ness monster, having been seen centuries ago in this Irish Loch. So I asked the shopkeeper down by the water side if she had heard of it. Without a pause, she continued to wrap up my small purchase, and replied with cheerful sincerity. “Take
no
notice of them ones; if you are wishful to bathe, bathe, for they are very rare! Indade they are rare.”
    I never came so close to a prehistoric monster before.
Prehistoric Remains Abound in Ireland
    Actually the whole of Ireland is happy hunting ground for relics of the prehistoric age. The antlers of the great Irish