This is the
happy-go-lucky Irish philosophy, and there is mixed with it a deal
of simple trust in God.
How many exiles and wanderers, both those who have no fortune and
those who have failed to win it, dream of these cabin rows, these
sweet-scented boreens with their 'banks of furze unprofitably gay,'
these leaking thatches with the purple loosestrife growing in their
ragged seams, and, looking backward across the distance of time and
space, give the humble spot a tender thought, because after all it
was in their dear native isle!
'Pearly are the skies in the country of my fathers,
Purple are thy mountains, home of my heart;
Mother of my yearning, love of all my longings,
Keep me in remembrance long leagues apart.'
I have been thinking in this strain because of an old dame in the
first cabin in Lisdara row, whose daughter is in America, and who
can talk of nothing else. She shows us the last letter, with its
postal order for sixteen shillings, that Mida sent from New York,
with little presents for blind Timsy, 'dark since he were three
years old,' and for lame Dan, or the 'Bocca,' as he is called in
Lisdara. Mida was named for the virgin saint of Killeedy in
Limerick.* "And it's she that's good enough to bear a saint's name,
glory be to God!" exclaims the old mother returning Mida's
photograph to a hole in the wall where the pig cannot possibly
molest it.
* Saint Mide, the Brigit of Munster.
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