There was one in particular, driving a donkey in a straw-coloured governess cart, to whose graceful charm we succumbed on the instant.

There was an exquisite deluderin' wildness about her, a vivacity, a length of eyelash with a gleam of Irish grey eye, 'the greyest of all things blue, the bluest of all things grey,' that might well have inspired the English poet to write of her as he did of his own Irish wife; for Spenser, when he was not writing the Faerie Queene, or smoking Raleigh's fragrant weed, wooed and wedded a fair colleen of County Cork.
'Tell me, ye merchant daughters, did ye see So fayre a creature in your town before?
Her goodlie eyes, like sapphyres shining bright; Her forehead, ivory white; Her lips like cherries, charming men to byte.' Now we turned into the old Mardyke Walk, a rus in urbe, an avenue a mile long lined with noble elm-trees; forsaken now as a fashionable promenade for the Marina, but still beautiful and still beloved, though frequented chiefly by nurse-maids and children.

Such babies and such children, of all classes and conditions--so jolly, smiling, dimpled, curly-headed; such joyous disregard of rags and dirt; such kindness one to the other in the little groups, where a child of ten would be giving an anxious eye to four or five brothers and sisters, and mothering a contented baby in arms as well.
Our driver, though very loquacious, was not quite intelligible.

He pronounced the simple phrase 'St.Patrick's Street' in a way to astonish the traveller; it would seem impossible to crowd as many h's into three words, and to wrap each in flannel, as he succeeded in doing.

He seemed pleased with our admiration of the babies, and said that Irish children did be very fat and strong and hearty; that they were the very best soldiers the Queen had, God kape her! They could stand anny hardship and anny climate, for they were not brought up soft, like the English.
He also said that, fine as all Irish children undoubtedly were, Cork produced the flower of them all, and the finest women and the finest men; backing his opinion with an Homeric vaunt which Francesca took down on the spot:-- 'I'd back one man from Corkshire To bate ten more from Yorkshire: Kerrymen Agin Derrymen, And Munster agin creation, Wirrasthrue! 'tis a pity we aren't a nation!' Here he slackened his pace as we passed a small bosthoon driving a donkey, to call out facetiously, "Be good to your little brother, achree!" "We must be very near Coolkilla House by this time," said Francesca.
"That isn't Salemina sitting on the bench under the trees, is it?
There is a gentleman with her, and she never wears a wide hat, but it looks like her red umbrella.