Chapter X. The belles of Shandon.

'The spreading Lee that, like an Island fayre,
Encloseth Corke with his divided floode.'
Edmund Spenser.

We had seen all that Youghal could offer to the tourist; we were
yearning for Salemina; we wanted to hear Benella talk about 'the
science'; we were eager to inspect the archaeologist, to see if he
'would do' for Salemina instead of the canon, or even the minor canon,
of the English Church, for whom we had always privately destined her.
Accordingly we decided to go by an earlier train, and give our family
a pleasant surprise. It was five o'clock in the afternoon when our car
trundled across St. Patrick's Bridge, past Father Mathew's statue, and
within view of the church and bells of Shandon, that sound so grand on
the pleasant waters of the river Lee. Away to the west is the two-armed
river. Along its banks rise hills, green and well wooded, with beautiful
gardens and verdant pastures reaching to the very brink of the shining
stream.

It was Saturday afternoon, and I never drove through a livelier,
quainter, more easy-going town. The streets were full of people selling
various things and plying various trades, and among them we saw many
a girl pretty enough to recall Thackeray's admiration of the Corkagian
beauties of his day. There was one in particular, driving a donkey in a
straw-coloured governess cart, to whose graceful charm we succumbed on
the instant. There was an exquisite deluderin' wildness about her,
a vivacity, a length of eyelash with a gleam of Irish grey eye, 'the
greyest of all things blue, the bluest of all things grey,' that might
well have inspired the English poet to write of her as he did of his own
Irish wife; for Spenser, when he was not writing the Faerie Queene,
or smoking Raleigh's fragrant weed, wooed and wedded a fair colleen of
County Cork.

'Tell me, ye merchant daughters, did ye see
So fayre a creature in your town before?
Her goodlie eyes, like sapphyres shining bright;
Her forehead, ivory white;
Her lips like cherries, charming men to byte.'

Now we turned into the old Mardyke Walk, a rus in urbe, an avenue a mile
long lined with noble elm-trees; forsaken now as a fashionable promenade
for the Marina, but still beautiful and still beloved, though frequented
chiefly by nurse-maids and children. Such babies and such children, of
all classes and conditions--so jolly, smiling