For pictures he cared not at all, and music he absolutely disliked; though to amuse me he would sometimes "sing," in a soft undertone and with much gravity, funny little nursery rhymes and snatches of the songs of his college days.
His dislike of social life was so great that he would never accept any invitation that could be in any way avoided; and if sometimes I absolutely insisted upon his going to any reception or dinner party, he would go with the grim determination of one fulfilling a most unpleasant duty. He often told me that it was because he hated "Saxons" (a hatred which years of tradition had fostered) so much, and felt ill at ease in any gathering of English people.
He certainly did not feel this with the working classes, with whom he would constantly converse and watch at work when we were out together. Agricultural labourers did not interest him so much, but he used to spend hours talking to mechanics of all classes, seamen, road-menders, builders, and any and every kind of artisan. To these he always spoke in an easy, friendly way of their work, their wages, and the conditions of labour, and I never remarked that suspiciousness and reserve, characteristic of the English wageworker, in these men when Parnell talked { 308} with them. They seemed to accept him, not as one of themselves, but as an interesting and an interested "labour leader," who had the unusual merit of wishing to hear their views instead of offering them his own.
Parnell was intensely superstitious, with all the superstition of the Irish peasant, and in this he was unreasoning and unreasonable. This trait was evidently acquired in earliest childhood and had grown with his growth, for some of these superstitions are the heritage of ages in the Irish people, and have their origin in some perfectly natural fear, or association, that has, generation by generation, by alteration of habit or circumstance, lost its force while retaining, or even adding to, its expression.
Parnell would agree perfectly that this was a fact, nevertheless to do so-and-so was "unlucky," and there was the end of it--it must not be done. Certain combinations of numbers, of lights or circumstances, were "omens," and must be carefully avoided. Evidently, as an intelligent child will, he had eagerly caught up and absorbed all and every suggestion offered him by the converse of his nurse and her associates, and the impressions thus made were overlaid, but not erased, as he grew up isolated, by the very reticence of his nature, from his fellows. His dislike of the colour green, as being unlucky, he could not himself understand, for it is certainly not an Irish feeling, but it was there so decidedly that he would not sit in any room that had this colour in it, nor would he allow me to wear or use any of the magnificent silks or embroideries that were so often presented to him, if, as was generally the case, they had green in their composition.