Of course, these girls are aware that we admire them--how could they help
it? They carry big baskets on either shapely arm, bundles balanced on
their heads, and we, suddenly grown tired, sit on the bankside as they
pass by, and feign indifference to their charms.

Once safely past, we admiringly examine their tracks in the soft mud (for
there has been a shower during the night), and we vow that such
footprints were never before left upon the sands of time.

The typical young woman in Ireland is Juno before she was married; the
old woman is Sycorax after Caliban was weaned. Wrinkled, toothless,
yellow old hags are seen sitting by the roadside, rocking back and forth,
crooning a song that is mate to the chant of the witches in "Macbeth"
when they brew the hellbroth.

See that wizened, scarred and cruel old face--how it speaks of a seared
and bitter heart! so dull yet so alert, so changeful yet so impassive, so
immobile yet so cunning--a paradox in wrinkles, where half-stifled
desperation has clawed at the soul until it has fled, and only dead
indifference or greedy expectation is left to tell the tragic tale.

"In the name of God, charity, kind gentlemen, charity!" and the old crone
stretches forth a long, bony claw. Should you pass on she calls down
curses on your head. If you are wise, you go back and fling her a copper
to stop the cold streaks that are shooting up your spine. And these old
women were the most trying sights I saw in Ireland.

"Pshaw!" said a friend of mine when I told him this; "these old creatures
are actors, and if you would sit down and talk to them, as I have done,
they will laugh and joke, and tell you of sons in America who are
policemen, and then they will fill black 'dhudeens' out of your tobacco
and ask if you know Mike McGuire who lives in She-ka-gy."

The last trace of comeliness has long left the faces of these repulsive
beggars, but there is a type of feminine beauty that comes with years. It
is found only where intellect and affection keep step with spiritual
desire; and in Ireland, where it is often a crime to think, where
superstition stalks, and avarice rules, and hunger crouches, it is very,
very rare.

But I met one woman in the Emerald Isle whose hair was snow-white, and
whose face seemed to beam a benediction. It was a countenance refined by
sorrow, purified by aspiration, made peaceful by right intellectual
employment, strong through self-reliance, and gentle by an earnest f