For the moment my own arrival is the chief subject of interest, and
the men who come in are eager to talk to me.
Some of them express themselves more correctly than the ordinary
peasant, others use the Gaelic idioms continually and substitute
'he' or 'she' for 'it,' as the neuter pronoun is not found in modern
Irish.
A few of the men have a curiously full vocabulary, others know only
the commonest words in English, and are driven to ingenious devices
to express their meaning. Of all the subjects we can talk of war
seems their favourite, and the conflict between America and Spain is
causing a great deal of excitement. Nearly all the families have
relations who have had to cross the Atlantic, and all eat of the
flour and bacon that is brought from the United States, so they have
a vague fear that 'if anything happened to America,' their own
island would cease to be habitable.
Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are
bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and
think in many different idioms. Most of the strangers they see on
the islands are philological students, and the people have been led
to conclude that linguistic studies, particularly Gaelic studies,
are the chief occupation of the outside world.
'I have seen Frenchmen, and Danes, and Germans,' said one man, 'and
there does be a power a Irish books along with them, and they
reading them better than ourselves.
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