Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/169

 imitators here; but both the contesting candidates found it convenient to declare that they gave no sanction to these malign proceedings. I announced meetings in succession in the principal centres of population. An election in Australia was very like an election in Ireland, a hustings where the candidates were proposed, and public meetings where they explained themselves.

I positively refused to make domiciliary visits to the constituents, and still more decisively to visit public men among them. But there]was a village called Killarney inhabited, I was told, by Irish evicted tenants who had thriven prodigiously in their new home. This was a sight I longed to see, and my committee fixed a time for a visit. The first house we entered had all the evidence of rude careless plenty. A bottle of Martell's brandy was immediately placed on the table, flanked by a huge decanter full as it seemed of sparkling transparent water. I had slight experience in drinking raw spirits, but it was impossible to refuse pledging the prosperity of the Irish village. I poured a spoonful of brandy into a tumbler, and after drowning it in water, put it to my lips. The brandy, I concluded, must be of abnormal strength, for the water had' not made it palatable, and I had recourse to the decanter a second time, and filled my tumbler to the brim.

"Is this water bewitched?" I cried, "the brandy does not grow weaker but stronger, the more I pour upon it." The farmer and his good woman burst into a merry laugh; the transparent fluid was not water but gin. There was a similar plenty in all the houses, and a similar hospitality. In one of the last I entered I met a signal illustration of what Ireland had lost by want of education. The farmer took me aside, and asked me to look at his bank book. He could not read or write, and as he rented his land from the "Stores" in Belfast and gave them his harvest to sell, he was completely at their mercy. There was nothing wrong in the account which I could detect, but I saw with amazement that an Irish peasant who had probably found it hard to retain potatoes enough for daily bread in Ireland had one item in his bank account of £1,500, the price of his wheat, and had more comfort and plenty about him than any ordinary squire at