Penelope's Irish Experiences. Wiggin Kate Douglas Smith
Child’s History of Ireland. The volume had been bought in Dublin by Salemina and presented to us as a piece of genial humour, but it became our daily companion.
I made a rhyme for her, which she sent Miss Peabody, to show her that we were growing in wisdom, notwithstanding our separation from her.
‘You have thought of Sir Walter as soldier and knight, Edmund Spenser, you’ve heard, was well able to write; But Raleigh the planter, and Spenser verse-maker, Each, oddly enough, was by trade ‘Undertaker.‘’
It was in 1589 that the Shepherd of the Ocean, as Spenser calls him, sailed to England to superintend the publishing of the Faerie Queene: so from what I know of authors’ habits, it is probable that Spenser did read him the poem under the Yew Tree in Myrtle Grove garden. It seems long ago, does it not, when the Faerie Queene was a manuscript, tobacco just discovered, the potato a novelty, and the first Irish cherry-tree just a wee thing newly transplanted from the Canary Islands? Were our own cherry-trees already in America when Columbus discovered us, or did the Pilgrim Fathers bring over ‘slips’ or ‘grafts,’ knowing that they would be needed for George Washington later on, so that he might furnish an untruthful world with a sublime sentiment? We re-read Salemina’s letter under the Yew Tree:—
MY DEAREST GIRLS,—It seems years instead of days since we parted, and I miss the two madcaps more than I can say. In your absence my life is always so quiet, discreet, dignified,—and, yes, I confess it, so monotonous! I go to none but the best hotels, meet none but the best people, and my timidity and conservatism for ever keep me in conventional paths. Dazzled and terrified as I still am when you precipitate adventures upon me, I always find afterwards that I have enjoyed them in spite of my fears. Life without you is like a stenographic report of a dull sermon; with you it is by turns a dramatic story, a poem, and a romance. Sometimes it is a penny-dreadful, as when you deliberately leave your luggage on an express train going south, enter another standing upon a side track, and embark for an unknown destination. I watched you from an upper window of the Junction Hotel, but could not leave Benella to argue with you. When your respected husband and lover have charge of you, you will not be allowed such pranks, I warrant you.
Benella has improved wonderfully in the last twenty-four hours, and I am trying to give her some training for her future duties. We can never forget our native land so long as we have her with us, for she is a perfect specimen of the Puritan spinster, though too young in years, perhaps, for determined celibacy. Do you know, we none of us mentioned wages in our conversations with her? Fortunately she seems more alive to the advantages of foreign travel than to the filling of her empty coffers. (By the way, I have written to the purser of the ship that she crossed in, to see if I can recover the sixty or seventy dollars she left behind her.) Her principal idea in life seems to be that of finding some kind of work that will be ‘interestin’’ whether it is lucrative or not.
I don’t think she will be able to dress hair, or anything of that sort—save in the way of plain sewing, she is very unskilful with her hands; and she will be of no use as courier, she is so provincial and inexperienced. She has no head for business whatever, and cannot help Francesca with the accounts. She recites to herself again and again, ‘Four farthings make one penny, twelvepence make one shilling, twenty shillings make one pound’; but when I give her a handful of money and ask her for six shillings and sixpence, five and three, one pound two, or two pound ten, she cannot manage the operation. She is docile, well mannered, grateful, and really likable, but her present philosophy of life is a thing of shreds and patches. She calls it ‘the science,’ as if there were but one; and she became a convert to its teachings this past winter, while living in the house of a woman lecturer in Salem, a lecturer, not a ‘curist,’ she explains. She attended to the door, ushered in the members of classes, kept the lecture-room in order, and so forth, imbibing by the way various doctrines, or parts of doctrines, which she is not the sort of person to assimilate, but with which she is experimenting: holding, meantime, a grim intuition of their foolishness, or so it seems to me. ‘The science’ made it easier for her to seek her ancestors in a foreign country with only a hundred dollars in her purse; for the Salem priestess proclaims the glad tidings that all the wealth of the world is ours, if we will but assert our heirship. Benella believed this more or less until a week’s sea-sickness undermined all her new convictions of every sort. When she woke in the little bedroom at O’Carolan’s, she says, her heart was quite at rest, for she knew that we were the kind of people one could rely on! I mustered courage to say, “I hope so, and I hope also that we shall be able to rely upon you, Benella!”
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