m Cannes to Caen, my
English had something of the idiomatic peculiarity of the gentleman
just alluded to; and were I only to speak once in Ireland, I must
be inevitably detected. There was then no choice for it; I must even
consent to talk through an interpreter,--a rather dull situation for a
man about to "tour it" in Ireland!

As the Prince's journey was a secret in Paris, our arrangements were
made with great caution and despatch. We travelled down to Boulogne with
merely one other companion, an old Colonel Demaunais, who had been for
some years a prisoner in England, and spoke English fluently, and with
only three servants; there was nothing in our "cortege" betraying the
rank of his Royal Highness.

Apartments had been prepared for us at Mivart's, and we dined each
day at the French Embassy,--going to the Opera in the evening, and
sight-seeing all the forenoon, like genuine "country cousins." The Court
was in Scotland; but even had it been in London, I conclude that the
Prince would have been received in some mode which should not have
attracted publicity.

Ten days sufficed for "town," and we set out for Ireland, to visit which
his Royal Highness was all impatience and eagerness.

Never can I forget the sensations with which I landed on that shore,
which, about a dozen years before, I had quitted barefooted and hungry!
Was the change alone in me; or what had come over the objects, to
make them so very different from what they once were? The hotel that
I remembered to have regarded as a kind of palace, where splendor and
profusion prevailed, seemed now dirty and uncared-for; the waiters
slovenly, the landlord rude, the apartments mean, and the food
detestable! The public itself, as it paraded on the pier, was not that
gorgeous panorama I once saw there,--the mingled elegance and fashion I
used to regard with such eyes of wonderment and envy. What had become of
them? Good looks there were, and in abundance,--for Irish women will
be pretty, no matter what changes come over the land; but the men! good
lack, what a strange aspect did they present! Without the air of fashion
you see in Paris, or that more strongly marked characteristic of style
and manliness the parks of London exhibit, here were displayed a kind
of swaggering self-sufficiency whose pretension was awfully at variance
with the mediocrity of their dress, and the easy jocularity that leered
from their eyes. Some were aquatics, and wore Jersey shirts an