Sunbeams from Cucumbers

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 13, 30 March 1905, Page 2

Sunbeams from Cucumbers

Some years ago — it was during the distress in Cotinaught in 1898— a well-meaning Englishman remarked to an Irislh beauty in a London drawing-room . ' I thought the Irish could extract sunbeams from cucumbers ; but I find that many of them cannot do this.' ' I thirok,' replied the lady, ' if you will only look deeper, you will find tihat those are the Irish who— haven't got cucumbers.' Tennyaon's Lancelot was ' mirthful in a stately way. 1 But the'*peaple of the Green Isle are mirthful in a homely and unsitately way, and contrive, somehow., to extract the sunbeams of smiles or of sweet resignation from evem tihe bitterest woes that befall them. In ' Bladk Forty-seven,' for instance, a ' relief ' doctor remarked to a starving and toothless old dame in Skibbe'reen : ' Why, granny, you've lost all your teeth ! ' ' 'Deed,' replied the poor old animated skeleton, ' an' isn't it time to lose 'em whin I've nothin' for 'em to do ? ' There were not many cucumbers or sunbeams about Skibbereen in those agonising days. But the starving people, fortified by their splendid faitih and hope and love of God, went through the dire agofo'y of their long martyrdom in the spirit that cheered Clement and CeciMa and Cayenne and the rest under the hands of the torturer. Over a million died of famine and famine-fever ; but there is no record of so much as a single siuicide among the suffering and heroic people. The same sfpirit of eheorflul fortitude arid heaven-ih-spired hope entfures to this day. The same kind of blight that has settled down in the potato-crops in New Zealand has— owing to economic conditions created long ago by landlordism — again created much distress over wide areas in the West of Ireland. The sipecial correspjotfdejnt of ' Leslie's Weekly ' (New York) has

lately been describing, with a skilled and sympathetic pen, the scenes that he has witnessed in ' darkest Ireland.' .' At the last poor cabin that I came to,' says he, ' before reaching Gal way I went in and, as usual, said : " God save all here ! " I had found that this Irish salutation at once denoted that I was an expericnc(<d traveller in that country, and the invariable rpply was : " God save ye." In this last cabin one of t|he women said ■ " I haven't eaten a bit this blessed day, glory be to God ! " Another of the women said : " Troth, I've suffered long time from poverty and sickness, glory be to God ! " I mention these remarks of the poor women,' says the American writer, ' to illustrate the meekness and resignation with which these people bear their misfortunes and affliction.' They are the stuff that saints and martyrs are made