At the Brodigans' (Mr. Brodigan is a large farmer, and our nearest neighbour) all the clocks are from ten to twenty minutes fast or slow; and what a peaceful place it is! The family doesn't care when it has its dinner, and, mirabile dictu, the cook doesn't care either!
"If you have no exact time to depend upon, how do you catch trains?"
I asked Mr. Brodigan.
"Sure that's not an everyday matter, and why be foostherin' over it?
But we do, four times out o' five, ma'am!"
"How do you like it that fifth time when you miss it?"
"Sure it's no more throuble to you to miss it the wan time than to hurry five times! A clock is an overrated piece of furniture, to my mind, Mrs. Beresford, ma'am. A man can ate whin he's hungry, go to bed whin he's sleepy, and get up whin he's slept long enough; for faith and it's thim clocks he has inside of himself that don't need anny winding!"
"What if you had a business appointment with a man in the town, and missed the train?" I persevered.
"Trains is like misfortunes; they never come singly, ma'am.
Wherever there's a station the trains do be dhroppin' in now and again, and what's the differ which of thim you take?"
"The man who is waiting for you at the other end of the line may not agree with you," I suggested.
"Sure, a man can always amuse himself in a town, ma'am. If it's your own business you're coming on, he knows you'll find him; and if it's his business, then begorra let him find you!" Which quite reminded me of what the Irish elf says to the English elf in Moira O'Neill's fairy story: "A waste of time? Why, you've come to a country where there's no such thing as a waste of time. We have no value for time here. There is lashings of it, more than anybody knows what to do with."
I suppose there is somewhere a golden mean between this complete oblivion of time and our feverish American hurry. There is a 'tedious haste' in all people who make wheels and pistons and engines, and live within sound of their everlasting buzz and whir and revolution; and there is ever a disposition to pause, rest, and consider on the part of that man whose daily tasks are done in serene collaboration with dew and rain and sun. One cannot hurry Mother Nature very much, after all, and one who has much to do with her falls into a peaceful habit of mind. The mottoes of the two nations are as well rendered in the vernacular as by any formal or stilted phrases. In Ireland the spoken or unspoken slogan is, 'Take it aisy'; in America, 'Keep up with the procession'; and between them lie all the thousand differences of race, climate, temperament, religion, and government.
I don't suppose there is a nation on the earth better developed on what might be called the train-catching side than we of the Big Country, and it is well for us that there is born every now and again among us a dreamer who is (blessedly) oblivious of time-tables and market reports; who has been thinking of the rustling of the corn, not of its price. It is he, if we do not hurry him out of his dream, who will sound the ideal note in our hurly-burly and bustle of affairs. He may never discover a town site, but he will create new worlds for us to live in, and in the course of a century the coming Matthew Arnold will not be minded to call us an unimaginative and uninteresting people.
