They are forbidden to take any fees, but after they had examined the remaining baggage in the morning they came to ask for something ‘just for packing up the trunks again’. All this is completely Irish and made us remember if we could have forgotten it that there was sea between us and home. It was with difficulty that one of my companions could be persuaded that the milkiness of the eggs we had at breakfast was not another peculiarity of this country.
[p. 6] Waterford is a large city computed to contain 35,000 inhabitants.8 It is, however, no part of my plan to give long histories of the Cities & Towns of Ireland copied from other books or dictated from Irish Hearsays. I do not presume in this little essay founded on so short a stay in the country to give a complete account even of the small part of the Island which I visited. I only endeavour by my mite of information to add to the little knowledge we possess of the country. Carlisle says it had no bridge9 which is a mistake as it has a wooden bridge built I believe by an American of the name of Cox.10 [p. 7] We found the Commercial Hotel at Waterford a very good inn but were nevertheless so impatient to begin our search after plants and insects that we would willingly have left it the day we arrived, had we been able to engage a chaise & horses soon enough for that
If an Irish shopkeeper were to demand 7/- or 21/- for any article his customer would be at a loss to conceive what could have induced him to fix on such odd sums. An Irishman who prided himself on his correct English pronunciation went into a shop in England and purchased a walking stick the price of which was two and six pence. Without having any reason to suppose that his accent had betrayed him, he threw down half a crown but as he did not leave the shop the master asked him if he wanted anything else — he was waiting for his change. ‘No, Sir. The [p. 8] stick was two & sixpence’, and ‘I gave you 2/8 1/2’. ‘I presume Sir you are from Ireland’. The disappointed Hibernian turned on his heel and left the shop.
Some other peculiarities immediately strike every Englishman on his arrival in this country. The strongly aspirated dialect called the brogue12 — the confusion of will and shall — the want of neatness and finish in almost everything, the coarseness of the lower class of females and the convenient car put close to the horse and recovering his dung13.