The driver asks to be remembered.
I mentally wonder what for. I paid a porter to place my bag on the car.
I got up as I could, I scramble down as I may. I will pay another porter
to take me to a hotel. The driver's whip takes as much notice of me as
he does. Why in the world should I remember him? It is part of a system
of imposition and it would be rank communism to find fault, so I
remember him; he thanks me, and this little game of give and take ends.
Installed in the Imperial Hotel I send off my one letter of
introduction, which remains. Discover the post office, find no letters,
return and sit down to write across the water. The lady proprietor of
the Imperial Hotel has been across the Atlantic and has a warm feeling
toward the inhabitants of the great republic; she shares the benefit of
this feeling with the wandering Canadian and takes us out to see Sligo.
Gladly do we lay down the pen to look Sligo straight in the face. Sligo
looks nice and clean. Belfast is large, prosperous, beautiful; but many
of her fine buildings and public monuments look as if they required to
have their faces washed, but Sligo buildings are fair and clean. We pass
a rather nice building, suppose it a school, but we are informed it is
the rent-office of the late Lord Palmerston. That astute nobleman showed
his usual good sense, if it was his choice, to own lands in the sunny
vales of Sligo instead of the hungry hills of Leitrim. If some have
greatness thrust upon them, some in the same way inherit lands. Out of
the town we went, and climbed up a grassy eminence; with some difficulty
got upon the "topmost tow'ring height" of an old earthwork - blamed on
the Danes of course; everything unknown is laid on them. The square
shape, the remains of the ditch that surrounds it look too much like
modern modes of fortification not to have a suspiciously British look.
Of course we are both delightfully ignorant on the subject.
The scenery from our elevated position is glorious. At our feet Sligo,
all her buildings, churches and convents white in the sunshine, around
her the fairest of green fields; the blue waters of Lough Gill sparkling
and glancing from among trees of every variety that in spring put on a
mantle of leaves. On every side but the gate of the west through which
we see a misty glance of the far Atlantic, Sligo has mountains standing
sentry around her. One, Knock-na-rea, is seen from a great distance, a
long mountain with a little mountain on her breast. The bells were
chiming musically, the sound floating up to where we stood. Below us, on
the other side of the old earthwork, a little apart from one another,
stood two great buildings, that are so necessary here, the poor-house
and the lunatic asylum.
