Away to the west is the two-armed river. Along its banks rise
hills, green and well wooded, with beautiful gardens and verdant
pastures reaching to the very brink of the shining stream.
It was Saturday afternoon, and I never drove through a livelier,
quainter, more easy-going town. The streets were full of people
selling various things and plying various trades, and among them we
saw many a girl pretty enough to recall Thackeray's admiration of
the Corkagian beauties of his day. There was one in particular,
driving a donkey in a straw-coloured governess cart, to whose
graceful charm we succumbed on the instant. There was an exquisite
deluderin' wildness about her, a vivacity, a length of eyelash with
a gleam of Irish grey eye, 'the greyest of all things blue, the
bluest of all things grey,' that might well have inspired the
English poet to write of her as he did of his own Irish wife; for
Spenser, when he was not writing the Faerie Queene, or smoking
Raleigh's fragrant weed, wooed and wedded a fair colleen of County
Cork.
'Tell me, ye merchant daughters, did ye see
So fayre a creature in your town before?
Her goodlie eyes, like sapphyres shining bright;
Her forehead, ivory white;
Her lips like cherries, charming men to byte.'
Now we turned into the old Mardyke Walk, a rus in urbe, an avenue a
mile long lined with noble elm-trees; forsaken now as a fashionable
promenade for the Marina, but still beautiful and still beloved,
though frequented chiefly by nurse-maids and children.
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