Hill came here there
were not ten square feet of window-glass in the whole parish outside of
the Church, the national school, and the residence of the chief
police-officer.

Windows when there were any were closed with dried sheepskins, through
which the cats ran in and out as freely as through the curious tunnel
which the kindly Master of Blantyre has constructed at Sheba's Cross for
their special benefit.

There were two beds in the main room; rather high than low, one of
rushes, on which lay the child of whom I have spoken, and one of
greater pretensions vacant in another corner.

The door stood wide open, but the cabin was warm and comfortable, and a
peat fire smouldered, sending up, to me, most agreeable odours. An inner
room seemed to be a sort of granary, full of hay and straw. There the
cow is kept at night. "It's handy if you want a drink of milk," said the
visitor. In comparison with the dwellings of small farmers in Eastern
France or in Southern Italy this Donegal cabin was not only clean but
attractive. It was more squalid perhaps, but less dreary than the
extemporised and flimsy dwellings of settlers in the extreme Far West of
the United States, and I should say decidedly a more wholesome
habitation than the hermetically sealed and dismal wooden houses of
hundreds of struggling farmers in the older Eastern States. I am sure my
old friend Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, who made the only thorough surveys
of agricultural life in the United States before the Civil War, would
have pronounced it in all respects superior, so far as health and
comfort go, to the average home of the average "poor buccra," between
the Chesapeake and the Sabine. I am afraid a great deal of not wholly
innocuous nonsense has been written and spoken about this part of the
United Kingdom by well-meaning philanthropists who have gauged the
condition of the people here by their own standards of comfort and
enjoyment. Most things in this life of ours are relative. I well
remember hearing an American millionaire, who began life in New York as
the patentee of a mouse-trap, express his profound compassion for a
judge of the Supreme Court condemned to live "upon a pittance of eight
thousand dollars a year."

These dwellers in the cabins of Donegal are millionaires, so far as
those essentials of life are concerned, which we call room and air and
freedom to move and breathe, in comparison with hundreds and thousands
of their own race in the slum