The Foolish Lovers | Page 2

description of Pickie would be "the Cowes of Ireland." In this way, the reporter, who subsequently became a member of parliament and made much money, pleased the harmless vanity of the lower, the middle and the upper classes of Pickie; and for a time they were "ill to thole" on account of the swollen condition of their heads, and it became necessary to utter sneers at "ham-and-egg parades" and "the tripper element" and to speak loudly and frequently of the superior merits of Portrush, "a really nice place," before they could be persuaded to believe that Pickie, like other towns, is inhabited by common human beings.
Ballyards never yielded an inch of its pride of place to Millreagh or to Pickie. "What's an oul' harbour when there's no boat in it?" Ballyards said to Millreagh; and, "Sure, the man makes his livin' sellin' sausages!" it said to Pickie when Pickie bragged of the great grocer who had joined the Yacht Club in order that he might issue a challenge for the Atlantic Cup. Tunnels and attractive seaboards were extraneous things that might bring fortune, but could not bring merit, to those lucky enough to possess them; but Ballyards had character ... its men were meritable men ... and Ballyards would not exchange the least of its inhabitants for ten tunnels. Nor did Ballyards abate any of its pride before the ancient and indisputable renown of Dunbar, which distils a whiskey that has soothed the gullets of millions of men throughout the world. When Patrickstown bragged of its long history ... it was once the home of the kings of Ulster ... and tried to make the world believe that St. Patrick was buried in its cathedral, Ballyards, magnificently imperturbed, murmured: "Your population is goin' down!"; nor does it manifest any respect for Greenry, which has a member of parliament to itself and has twice the population of Ballyards. "It's an ugly hole," says Ballyards, "an' it's full of Papishes!"
Millreagh and Pickie openly sneer at Ballyards, and Greenry affects to be unaware of it, but the pride of Ballyards remains unaltered, incapable of being diminished, incapable even of being increased ... for pride cannot go to greater lengths than the pride of Ballyards has already gone ... and in spite of contention and denial, it asserts, invincibly persistent, that it is the finest and most meritabie town in Ireland. When sceptics ask for proofs, Ballyards replies, "We don't need proofs!" A drunken man said, on a particularly hearty Saturday night, that Ballyards was the finest town in the world, but the general opinion of his fellow-townsmen was that this claim, while very human, was excessively expressed. London, for example, was bigger than Ballyards. So was New York!.... The drunken man, when he had recovered his sobriety, admitted that this was true, but he contended, and was well supported in his contention, that while London and New York might be bigger than Ballyards, neither of these cities were inhabited by men of such independent spirit as the men of Ballyards. A Ballyards man, he asserted, was beholden to no one. Once, and once only, a Millreagh man said that a Ballyards man thought he was being independent when he was being ill-bred; but Ballyards people would have none of this talk, and, after they had severely assaulted him, they drove the Millreagh man back to his "stinkin' wee town" and forbade him ever to put his foot in Ballyards again. "You know what you'll get if you do. Your head in your hands!" was the threat they shouted after him. And surely the wide world knows the story ... falsely credited to other places ... which every Ballyards child learns in its cradle, of the man who, on being rebuked in a foreign city for spitting, said to those who rebuked him, "I come from the town of Ballyards, an' I'll spit where I like!"

II
It was his pride in his birthplace which sometimes made John MacDermott hesitate to accept the advice of his Uncle Matthew and listen leniently to the advice of his Uncle William. Uncle Matthew urged him to seek his fortune in foreign parts, but Uncle William said, "Bedam to foreign parts when you can live in Ballyards!" Uncle Matthew, who had never been out of Ireland in his life, had much knowledge of the works of English writers, and from these works, he had drawn a romantic picture of London. The English city, in his imagination, was a place of marvellous adventures, far mere wonderful than the ancient city of Bagdad or the still more ancient city of Damascus, wherein anything might happen to a man who kept his eyes open or, for the matter of that, shut. He never tired of reading Mr. Andrew Lang's Historical Mysteries, and he