About eleven o’clock a policeman paused at the door, and intimated that it was time the house was shut up and the music stopped, and to outward appearances his friendly warning was complied with; but the harp still discoursed in a minor key, and a light tripping and shuffling of responsive feet might occasionally have been heard for an hour later.  When I arose to go, it was with a feeling of regret that I could not see more of this simple and social people, with whom I at once felt that “touch of nature” which “makes the whole world kin,” and my leave-taking was warm and hearty accordingly.

Through the wind and the darkness I threaded my way to the wharf, and in less than two hours afterward was a most penitent voyager, and fitfully joining in that doleful gastriloquial chorus that so often goes up from the cabins of those Channel steamers.

I hardly know why I went to Ireland, except it was to indulge the few drops of Irish blood in my veins, and maybe also with a view to shorten my sea voyage by a day.  I also felt a desire to see one or two literary men there, and in this sense my journey was eminently gratifying; but so far from shortening my voyage by a day, it lengthened it by three days, that being the time it took me to recover from the effects of it; and as to the tie of blood, I think it must nearly all have run out, for I felt but few congenital throbs while in Ireland.

The Englishman at home is a much more lovable animal than the Englishman abroad, but Pat in Ireland is even more of a pig than in this country.  Indeed, the squalor and poverty, and cold, skinny wretchedness one sees in Ireland, and (what freezes our sympathies) the groveling, swiny shiftlessness that pervades these hovels, no traveler can be prepared for.  It is the bare prose of misery, the unheroic of tragedy.  There is not one redeeming or mitigating feature.

Railway traveling in Ireland is not so rapid or so cheap as in England.  Neither are the hotels so good or so clean, nor the fields so well kept, nor the look of the country so thrifty and peaceful.  The dissatisfaction of the people is in the very air.  Ireland looks sour and sad.  She looks old, too, as do all those countries beyond seas,—­old in a way that the American is a stranger to.  It is not the age of nature, the unshaken permanence of the hills through long periods of time, but the weight of human years and human sorrows, as if the earth sympathized with man and took on his attributes and infirmities.

I did not go much about Dublin, and the most characteristic things I saw there were those queer, uncomfortable dog-carts,—­a sort of Irish bull on wheels, with the driver on one side balancing the passenger on the other, and the luggage occupying the seat of safety between.  It comes the nearest to riding on horseback, and on a side-saddle at that, of any vehicle-traveling I ever did.