'I landed in Liverpool two days ago,' he said, when I had wished him
the time of day; 'then I came to the city of Dublin this morning,
and took the train to Bray, where you have the blue salt water on
your left, and the beautiful valleys, with trees in them, on your
right. From that I drove to this place on a jaunting-car to see some
brothers and cousins I have living below. They're poor people,
Mister honey, with bits of cabins, and mud floors under them, but
they're as happy as if they were in heaven, and what more would a
man want than that? In America and Australia, and on the Atlantic
Ocean, you have all sorts, good people and bad people, and murderers
and thieves, and pickpockets; but in this place there isn't a being
isn't as good and decent as yourself or me.'

I saw he was one of the old people one sometimes meets with who
emigrated when the people were simpler than they are at present, and
who often come back, after a lifetime in the States, as Irish as any
old man who has never been twenty miles from the town of Wicklow. I
asked him about his life abroad, when we had talked a little longer.

'I've been through perils enough to slay nations,' he said, 'and the
people here think I should be rotten with gold, but they're better
off the way they are. For five years I was a ship's smith, and never
saw dry land, and I in all the danger and peril of the Atlantic
Ocean. Then I was a veterinary surgeon, curing side-slip,
splay-foot, spavin, splints, glanders, and the various ailments of
the horse and ass. The lads in this place think you've nothing to do
but to go across the sea and fill a bag with gold; but I tell you it
is hard work, and in those countries the workhouses is full, and the
prisons is full, and the crazyhouses is full, the same as in the
city of Dublin. Over beyond you have fine dwellings, and you have