" A LAND WITHOUT LAUGHTER."

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 379, 23 July 1880, Page 11

" A LAND WITHOUT LAUGHTER."

(James Red path's letter in the Tribune.} The Irish have been described by novelists and travellers as a light-hearted and rollicking people, full of fun and quick in repartee ; a devil-mny-care race of folks, equally ready to danco or to fight. I have rot found them sc. I found them in the West of Ireland a sad and despondent people ; care-worn, broken-heaited, and shrouded in glocm. Never once in the hundreds of cabins that I entered — never once even did 1 see a merry eye or hear the sound of a meriy voice. Old men and boyp, old women and girls — young men and maidens — all of them without a solitary exception, were prave or baggard, and eveiy household looked as if the plague of tbe first-born had smitten it that day. Rachael, weeping for her children, would have passed unnoticed among these waim-hcartcd peasantry, or. if she had been noticed, they only have said, '"she is one of us." A home without a child is cheerless enough ; but there is a whole region without a child's laugh in it. Cabins full of children — and no boisterous glee ! No need to tell tbes-e youngsteis to be quiet. The famine has tamed their restless spirits, and they crouch around the bit of peat fire without uttering a word. Often they do not look a second time at the stranger who comes into their cabin. I have seen so mnry fad sights in Ireland that it would be hard for me to choofe the worst of them. But the one ineiel<nt that made the deepest impreFHC/n on my mind was a visit to the convent of tie Sisters of lleicy at W<stj,ort, in county Mayo. Tie Reverend Mother, who founded it, I believe, and vtfco now has charge of it, is a relative of Archbishop Cullen ; and before the famire came, by her own zeal and tbe influence of her social connections, she had been able to build quite a handscme and solid institution. As the Sisters are the best teachers in the neighbourhood, the girls of the welUto-do citizens of Westport are taught at the convent. But it is also an industrial school, to which the waifs of society are sent by the Government. Frcni tbe fees of the town children and the money paid by the Government, aided by the contributions of Catholic benevolence in Ireland and England, the convent has always been able to maintain itself well ; and having inspected scores of similar institutions in our own country, supported both by public charity and tbe State, I can truthfully say, not from courtesy only, but knowledge, that the Westport Convent need fear no comparison with any industrial school in America. Everything is clean and wholesome ami cheerful aDOut it. But what recalkel America to me when I visited it was not its order nor its tidiness, but the fact that the children in the Industrial School looked happy and smiled — that they were wellbehaved little girls with laughing eyes, not the sad old women disguised as ragged girls, whom I had seen, with pink and chilblained feet, mute and shivering in the slippery and smoky cabins of the country. And yet these happy children, the only happy children I saw in the West — were either orphans or paupers or the cast-aways of the streets !" Can Americans conceive of a county, whose only happy children are in a public institution ? If you can do so. then you see the We^t of Ireland in the Winter of 1880. Now, don't say '• Goel pity them :" jnst pity them yourself first.