the lady, making change for the price of a ballad. "Some Irish folks. They
ginerally cries that way."

In yet earlier spring walks through Dublin, I found a depth of mud
appalling even to one who had lived three years in Charlesbridge. The
streets were passable only to pedestrians skilled in shifting themselves
along the sides of fences and alert to take advantage of every projecting
doorstep. There were no dry places, except in front of the groceries,
where the ground was beaten hard by the broad feet of loafing geese and
the coming and going of admirably small children making purchases there.
The number of the little ones was quite as remarkable as their size, and
ought to have been even more interesting, if, as sometimes appears
probable, such increase shall--together with the well-known ambition of
Dubliners to rule the land--one day make an end of us poor Yankees as a
dominant plurality.

The town was somewhat tainted with our architectural respectability,
unless the newness of some of the buildings gave illusion of this; and,
though the streets of Dublin were not at all cared for, and though every
house on the main thoroughfare stood upon the brink of a slough, without
yard, or any attempt at garden or shrubbery, there were many cottages in
the less aristocratic quarters inclosed in palings, and embowered in the
usual suburban pear-trees and currant-bushes. These, indeed, were
dwellings of an elder sort, and had clearly been inherited from a
population now as extinct in that region as the Pequots, and they were not
always carefully cherished. On the border of the hamlet is to be seen an
old farm-house of the poorer sort, built about the beginning of this
century, and now thickly peopled by Dubliners. Its gate is thrown down,
and the great wild-grown lilac hedge, no longer protected by a fence,
shows skirts bedabbled by the familiarity of lawless poultry, as little