Around the World Without a Cent

Around the World without a Cent
By Henry Spickler

Excerpt

IT was somewhere in the Wicklow Mountains on the coast-road between Dublin and Cork. The hour was noon, the day cold and wet. My only lunch was a half loaf of bread strapped to the wheel, which I leaned against a sod fence, and on the easy hospitality of the Island, was admitted into an Irish woman's cottage. I had paid a certain definite respect to the other inmate of the house-a long razor-back sow that came out as I went in. For some pictures which I carried I wished to obtain some bacon, a kindness never failing among the Irish, no matter how poor they might be, little thinking that the sow had also the same pain of hunger and was so soon to satisfy it at my expense. "From Ameriky!" said she, when I told her of my mission, "whare yez hiv iv'rything to ate and dhrink, and yez come over here to stharve!"

I had been listening and looking. The small chunk of peat lay on the open fire-place, smoking, but as usual not giving forth any heat. A pair of tongs and a wornout hand-bellows lay near by. In the middle of the floor was a puddle of water. An old clock that hadn't run for fifty years and a cheap crucifix were the only other ornaments on a heather-bordered shelf by a dusty chromo of the Virgin. "Youse look loike yer big and sthrong, why isn't yez home with yer folks, raisin' yer own pig?"

I told her more about my travels-that I was going around the world to see how the people lived.

"To see how they live? An' hasn't yez houses in Ameriky?"

I told her we had. Then she "crossed" herself, as a rooster, sporting a solitary tail feather, preceded two old hens down through the window in the cabin.

"Yes," I said, "I am to study people around the globe."

"The globe! Now what's that?"

"Why, you see I mean to go clear around the world. I am going to ride to Rome to see the Pope, and I'm now on my way to see Cork."

"Ter see Cork-k ! And yez are goin' ter ride all the way jes' ter see Cork-k! Can't yez see it on the map?"

Some people never see anything or get any place except on the map. She little dreamed of the great value of travel. Her vision of the earth was limited to the few wild hills around her cabin, and the map she once saw in a geography when a little girl. Little did she prize that wonderful camera, the eye, made that we might see the beauties and wonders of creation-that human lens that photographs more in ten seconds than the human mind can grasp in ten years ! Though she gave me no food, I was glad I could ride away. Like many others she was content, though her head be as empty as her house, to find out things and get to places ON THE MAP!

Discouraged in spirit and hungry in stomach, I...

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