A Peculiar People.

It is ten of an autumn morn by the chime. As I hurry on the path, I am sorely out of breath, and afraid that I, perhaps, am not in time. But I am in time. The hour is 10.5 a.m. The path is that which conducts to the station of the Ulster Railway Company; the object Galway. We are a light brigade of three hundred, without a charge; for to-morrow the Hibernia sails for Boston, and I am bound for the sea as one of a gallant gratis company, going down to Galway to celebrate that event. In point of fact, for this occasion only, I am the Boy for Galway. I am accompanied by two hundred ninety and nine others, all of them companions of unquestionable jollity, all of them Boys for Galway-to a Boy.

In my capacity of Boy for Galway, I start at 10.10 a.m. The train is very long, and all first-class; for when people travel free there and back, catch me one mean enough to go second! Ours differs much from ordinary trains, and notably in this—that in each carriage is a hamper, and in each hamper there are diverse meats, and curious old sherries, and pale brandies, and neat whiskies. Cards there be also; nor are solemn chess and sedate draughts wanting. By sedate draughts (I desire to state) I do not mean soda-water. The rigorous laws which forbid, and, as is well known, effectually prevent, smoking on railways, are on this occasion suspended, by general consent of the Company's company. Every carriage seems to have an internal communication with the puffing locomotive in front, or that behind; for we are so many that it takes two engines to drag and drive us. Also the strains of vocal melody are to be heard, and joyful noises of a melodious and popular character issue forth from carriages along the line, and compartments give outward and audible evidence of inward harmony. These hilarious proceedings so utterly upset the official mind of the porters and guards, that the Company's servants wear aspects of diversion, which, at 10.10 a.m., are wholly unbusinesslike and anachronistic. The state of the case is plainly that of a respectable five-per-cent-paying railway going out for the day, to have a lark with three hundred Boys for Galway.

Not unto me the narrative of that remarkable journey across Ireland, from Belfast Lough to Galway Bay, in six hours of jollification. Not unto me the description of our arrival at the City of the Tribes, and of a Heliogabalian champagne lunch, which we telegraphed for en routethink of that, in barbarous Ireland! "Lunch for three hundred," if you please!—and which was ready for us when we ran jovially into the station. Not unto me the account of the banquet and the ball, and the direful execution done thereat by the feminine "Galway Blazers." Not unto me the spirit-stirring sketch of the "bewtyful foight" in the hotel afterwards, when the "jintlemin, Lord save them! bruk all round them in their divarsion, the divils!" and wrecked the coffee-room. Not unto me the ceremonial of the Hibernia's sailing, which reopened the Galway

Route to America, and reconsecrated a Great Job. These things are written by Our Own in every variety of expanded English-more or less; and I will have none of them. I propose to myself to narrate briefly and from personal observation what I saw there of a Peculiar People.

A Public Writer in a public journal last year made candid avowal of the rapturous joy which he felt when he read of a boy having been eaten by a bear in the Pyrenees, or of a woman being attacked by a wolf come down from the Jura mountains. In these days of excessive civilisation he admitted that it gave him a glorious thrill to hear that savage nature was not yet entirely extinct in Europe. I clasp that Public Writer figuratively to my heart. We are kindred souls. If ever it should be my happy lot to meet that man, I will give him beer and my blessing. We are so terribly advanced, have so progressed, have such an amount of enlightened civilisation, that I hunger and thirst after a little barbarism. I shall never forget the rapture with which I went to see a herd of wild boars in a sporting preserve called Astroni, made out of the crater of an extinct volcano, for the uses of his late respected majesty King Bomba of Naples. I admit that those specimens of natural history excessively resembled black pigs; but to me they were wild boars. There is a chamois connected with a little hotel at the foot of the Righi, on the borders of the Lake, which fills my soul with an Alpine joy. It is a stuffed one, I concede; but still it is a chamois. I know of a herd of wild goats (real wild goats) resident on the craggy face of an Irish mountain-I am not going to say where. Generosity has its limits; but I have a delight in a venerable whitebeard of that little flock, which would fade utterly away, if I could get at him-as, I grieve to say, I have often basely essayed to do. With these instincts, I was not long in Galway before I was on my way to explore the (to me) fascinating locality where dwell the Peculiar People. For is it not fascinating-I address myself to any disciple of the late Mr. Buckle-is it not fascinating to think of a people now-a-days who, after seven centuries of conquest, occupation, and amalgamation with the Anglo-Saxon; who, dwelling within pistol-shot of a large city, a Transatlantic Packet Station, a terminal railway point, whereof the other end a metropolis where a Vice-King reigns ;-is it not fascinating, I ask any one with a taste of raw nature in his soul, to find a colony of people who can't speak English; who have laws, manners, and customs of their own; who keep fast by one special avocation; who marry and are given in marriage to no outsider; who have a king of their own election; who wear a costume of their own, and have no change in the fashions; who are to all intents and purposes as separate and apart from English civilisation as the gipsies, and yet are not nomadic, but have their fixed town and established occupation? What Wordsworth felt at sight of the daffodils, I feel as, joyously, I set my face towards the town, or village, or Galwegian suburb-The Claddagh.

With all Livingstonian ardour I explore my way to The Claddagh. I find it without very great difficulty, despite the instruction to "keep

straight on" whenever I am coming to diverging roads; and I thus make the discovery, that in Galwegian "keep straight on" means "take the road to the right." (I present this useful item of Irish topographical information gratuitously to the readers of this periodical.) Presently, I come in sight of many clusters of long-extended cottages, one-storied, thatched as to the roofs, brown-washed (not white-washed) as to the walls, and with significant indications of piscatorial pursuits. I encounter a sturdy young native. With difficulty I deny myself the delight of addressing him as "pescator dell' onde;" but I refrain, and winningly inquire if this be the way to The Claddagh. The sturdy young native stares at me, breathes heavily, and is about to proceed silently on his way, when I repeat my inquiry. To my inexpressible joy, I find that he does not understand me! It strikes me, further, as a remarkable fact, that I do not understand him, when at length he makes rejoinderfor he is speaking Irish! By a natural instinct of the Anglo-Saxon, I renew my inquiry in a much louder tone, under the universal idea that all foreigners who are unacquainted with English will comprehend it perfectly if you bawl at them. Then the young native breaks wildly out into pantomime; and, nodding rapidly at the sound of the word "Claddagh,” points with his finger, in a general manner, about halfway round the horizon-Newfoundland-way. I thank him very politely, and recal Mulligan's definition of his residence, when he stands on Westminster Bridge, and sweeping his stick over the S., S.W., and W. postal districts, answers grandly, "Sir! I live out yonder!" I go on my way rejoicing, and effectively I am at The Claddagh; and an eligible opportunity now offers for the marking, notation, and inward digestion of the manners and customs of my Peculiar People. I am compelled to admit, at the outset, that the scriptural association of a "Peculiar People" with a "zeal for good works," is admirably exemplified here. Charity is a good work; and the sudden zeal of my Peculiar People in stimulating me to the good work of giving them money, is unanimous, and rather fearsome. Like-very like a charge of donkey-boys at Cairo, come at me a herd of little brown chaps, with the blackest of eyes-natural, not acquired—with stretched-out palms and wild cries, in an unknown tongue, which I have, however, no difficulty whatever in translating as the exact Celtic equivalent for "backsheesh." The foremost youngster of the lot is conspicuous by an orange knot of a dirty kerchief, which is his theory of head-gear. The colour shows how artificial, after all, are party antipathies! In the highly intellectual, educated, and civilised part of Ireland whence I started this morning, I could get you yon little brown chap's head broke in less than half a minute, for dear sake of the colour of that orange topknot! Nay, I could get you up a row, all out of that little dirty bit of rag, that would keep a whole city in a savage ferment for a week, with military under arms, and streets lined with horse and foot police, to hinder two sections of Christians from murdering each other for doctrinal differences. Yea, my friend, come us-ward towards the middle of the

seventh month of any year of our Lord, and you will find us breaking the Protestant peace and Catholic heads with all the ferocity of Kickeraboo islanders. That's one of the charms of Irish residence; but to my Claddagh. Sevenpence-halfpenny, in halfpence, were summarily offered up as a sacrifice to appease the sacred thirst for copper of the little brown herd; who departed, with many cries, and much (to me) foreign expressions of rejoicing, to a distant bank, whereon sat a many-coloured crowd of women, with apple-baskets, and creels of apples, and sacks of apples, and apples shot down on the ground on straw-heaps,-a crowd more like that of the oyster-women on the Santa Lucia at Naples than any thing else in nature. Among these Hesperides rose much shrill clamour of competition at the sudden influx of bullion, which threatened seriously to disturb the level of market values; and then the little brown herd were silent for a little space, emulating the action of the sailor's chestnutmunching wife in Macbeth, and getting as near English cholera as the largesse of the Saxon would enable them to go. So I proceed on my way once more, and am in The Claddagh. The place is a little dirty, a little smoky, a little fishy. I have remarked similar characteristics elsewhere, by the shores of the ever-sounding sea, and therefore divert my attention from the "nate mud edifices" to their inhabitants. These I exultingly discover to be really a very Peculiar People,-peculiar in their appearance, peculiar in their dress, peculiar in their walk, and uncommonly peculiar in their conversation. They are very foreign: they have very brown skins, and very black eyes, and very bare legs; and are partly Spanish, partly Italian, partly Arab, wholly un-English. The men are as like lazzaroni as possible, only of a heavier build; wear the same costume of bright-coloured garments trimmed with dirt; lounge a good deal; have a great affinity for posts, and boat-thwarts, and low walls, and other places of public repose. But they are strong and sturdy, and look as if they could work when they liked. Some of the girls are very pretty, like Calabrian or Capriote contadine, and they carry pails on their heads, and so are upright. The Mediterranean parallel is carried out by the old ladies, who are remarkably ill-favoured, and have that charming complexion of an over-ripe, withered gourd, which has been forgotten to be eaten, and so has become wrinkled with crossness and disappointment. The public of The Claddagh goes freely in and out of other people's houses in an easy way, which shows that there is no nasty spirit of exclusiveness or reserve; and young Claddagh flirts ponderously with the good-looking girls who pass and repass in fulfilment of engrossing occupations, which, somehow, compel them always to cross close by where the young men are lounging. The conversation, I observe, is general; and I am a little confused at finding that, apparently, I am a current topic. The clatter of Irish as I walk along is very strange to the ear; and I feel quite continental, and enjoy the sensation amazingly. But I give myself a mental pull up, and remember that I ought to be acquiring information; and I look around for a desirable source. I think I see one: I approach him

blandly and interrogatively. My source is courteous, but wholly unintelligible. I next essay a fine young woman, who, seated on a pile of turf, hard by a door, is nursing a little brown baby; but I find, on near approach, that the baby is absolutely talking Irish baby-talk, and so I retreat, in conscious humiliation. A plump damsel, adjacent, looks encouraging; but my conversational attempt in that quarter evokes a rippling peal of merry laughter, and such a show of pearly teeth as somebody I know-but wouldn't for the world mention-would give twenty guineas for, if the property were transferable. I begin to feel uncomfortable, and am thinking that it is nearly time to despair, when Hope dawns upon me. Hope wears a bright red cap, of the once Phrygian, and now Capof-Liberty, style; a bright blue coat, cut fok'sle fashion; fawn-coloured knee-breeches, heather-purple woollen stockings, and ponderous brogues. I like the costume: I don't quite admire the dirt and the patches, but that is entirely a matter of taste. Fine ladies of the present days wear very dirty pigments; and still finer ladies of the past days wore still dirtier patches, as well as pigments. My Hope is probably sixty-and-five years old, has snow-white hair, coal-black eyes, and a very brown skin: he has one gold earring in his right ear, and one short black pipe in his mouth, which he withdraws, preparatory, I see, to his proceeding to tell me a flattering tale. My honour is welcome to The Claddagh; which is very pleasant to know. Hope's tale, to my great joy, is about to be continued in the English version. I at once fraternise. On inquiry, I ascertain that Hope has no objection to a slight spirituous refreshment at my expense, as testimony of the interest he feels in my sanatory condition. This preliminary measure adjusted,—the exact measure was half-a-pint, my source expands and swells with latent information, until he is like a huge intellectual bladder. I prick him, and he rushes forth in a torrent of statistical and ethnological particulars. The Peculiar People, I learn, are upwards of a thousand strong: they allow no stranger to settle or make his abiding-place among them: they speak Irish exclusively; they are all fishermen, without exception,-no other trade or occupation being recognised in The Claddagh; they have an elected sovereign," The King of the Claddagh,"--whom they loyally obey, and who carries a royal ensign, of his own pattern, at the masthead of his "hooker." When one king dies, they elect a new one by universal suffrage. The King of the Claddagh settles the times and the seasons of the fishing, and controls all the outgoings and incomings of the Claddagh Fleet: without his royal leave no net is thrown. He appoints the day on which it is his sovereign will and pleasure that the herring-catching shall begin; and, although the bay may be full of shoals of fish,-as it was during my visit,-before the appointed day not a man will launch his boat to catch them. The rights of women are strangely recognised in The Claddagh; the moment the fleet of boats comes in from sea, the mistresses become masters; their lords surrender up the fishy fruits of their labours. The women share and sell the produce, and give over