though good Catholics, the French are not thought perfectly honest,--
"things have been missed" since they came to blight with their crimes and
vices the once happy seat of integrity. It is amusing to find Dublin
fearful of the encroachment of the French, as we, in our turn, dread the
advance of the Irish. We must make a jest of our own alarms, and even
smile--since we cannot help ourselves--at the spiritual desolation
occasioned by the settlement of an Irish family in one of our suburban
neighborhoods. The householders view with fear and jealousy the erection
of any dwelling of less than a stated cost, as portending a possible
advent of Irish; and when the calamitous race actually appears, a mortal
pang strikes to the bottom of every pocket. Values tremble throughout that
neighborhood, to which the new-comers communicate a species of moral dry-
rot. None but the Irish will build near the Irish; and the infection of
fear spreads to the elder Yankee homes about, and the owners prepare to
abandon them,--not always, however, let us hope, without turning, at the
expense of the invaders, a Parthian penny in their flight. In my walk from
Dublin to North Charlesbridge, I saw more than one token of the
encroachment of the Celtic army, which had here and there invested a
Yankee house with besieging shanties on every side, and thus given to its
essential and otherwise quite hopeless ugliness a touch of the poetry that
attends failing fortunes, and hallows decayed gentility of however poor a
sort originally. The fortunes of such a house are, of course, not to be
retrieved. Where the Celt sets his foot, there the Yankee (and it is
perhaps wholesome if not agreeable to know that the Irish citizen whom we
do not always honor as our equal in civilization loves to speak of us
scornfully as Yankees) rarely, if ever, returns. The place remains to the
intruder and his heirs forever. We gracefully retire before him even in
politics, as the metropolis--if it is the metropolis--can witness; and we
wait with an anxious curiosity the encounter of the Irish and the Chinese,
now rapidly approaching each other from opposite shores of the continent.