"The question of salary," said Miss Grimshaw, "does not weigh particularly with me, as I am possessed of a small income of my own, to which I can, if I choose, add considerably with my pen. I am very much interested in the study of Ireland and the Irish, and would like to become more intimate at first-hand with your charming country, so I think we will waive the question of pounds, shillings, and pence. Any instruction I can give your little daughter will be amply repaid by your hospitality."
A nice letter written in a nice firm, sensible woman's hand.
Miss Grimshaw had referred Mr. French to several highly respectable people, but Mr. French, with that splendid indifference to detail which was part of his nature, had not troubled to take Miss Grimshaw's character up.
"Oh, bother her character," said he. "No woman has any character worth troubling about over forty."
"Porter, porter! does this train stop at Tullagh?"
"You're in the wrong thrain, mum; this thrain stops nowhere; this is the ixpress all the way to Cloyne. Out you get, for we want to be goin' on. Right, Larry!"
Miss Grimshaw, dusty and tired, seated in the corner of a first-class carriage, heard the foregoing dialogue, and smiled.
It came to her with a puff of gorse-scented air through the open window of the railway carriage.
"Now," said Miss Grimshaw to herself, "I really believe I am in Ireland."
Up to this, at Kingstown, in her passage through Dublin, and during the long, dusty, dull journey that followed, she had come across nothing especially national. It is not in the grooves of travel that you come across the spirit of Ireland.
Davy Stevens, selling his newspapers on the Carlisle pier at Kingstown, had struck her fancy, but nothing followed him up. The jarvey who drove her from station to station in Dublin was surly and so speechless that he might have been English. The streets were like English streets, the people like English people, the rain like English rain, only worse.
But it was not raining here. Here in the west, the train seemed drawing out of civilisation, into a new world--vast hills and purple moors, great spaces of golden afternoon, unspoiled by city or town, far mountain tops breaking to view and veiled in the loveliness of distance.