spoke a soothing word to her, while she wailed out her woe; and in the
midst some little ribald Irish boys came scuffling and quarreling up the
pathway, singing snatches of an obscene song; and when both the wailing
and the singing had died away, an old woman, decently clad, and with her
many-wrinkled face softened by the old-fashioned frill running round the
inside of her cap, dropped down upon her knees beside a very old grave,
and clasped her hands in a silent prayer above it.

[Illustration: "Looking about, I saw two women."]

If I had beheld all this in some village _campo santo_ in Italy, I
should have been much more vividly impressed by it, as an aesthetical
observer; whereas I was now merely touched as a human being, and had
little desire to turn the scene to literary account. I could not help
feeling that it wanted the atmosphere of sentimental association, the
whole background was a blank or worse than a blank. Yet I have not been
able to hide from myself so much as I would like certain points of
resemblance between our Irish and the poorer classes of Italians. The
likeness is one of the first things that strikes an American in Italy, and
I am always reminded of it in Dublin. So much of the local life appears
upon the street; there is so much gossip from house to house, and the talk
is always such a resonant clamoring; the women, bareheaded, or with a
shawl folded over the head and caught beneath the chin with the hand, have
such a contented down-at-heel aspect, shuffling from door to door, or
lounging, arms akimbo, among the cats and poultry at their own thresholds,
that one beholding it all might well fancy himself upon some Italian
_calle_ or _vicolo_. Of course the illusion does not hold good
on a Sunday, when the Dubliners are coming home from church in their
best,--their extraordinary best bonnets and their prodigious silk hats. It
does not hold good in any way or at any time, except upon the surface, for