He cannot get used to the steadiness of the ground, or rather, get at once rid of the unsteadiness of the ship. I found myself reeling from side to side on the sidewalk, and on entering the Queen's Hotel, holding on to a desk with one hand, to steady myself, while I wrote with the other. The rolling motion of the ship, to which you have become accustomed, is once more perceptible; and I knew one friend, who did not have a sick day on board ship, who was taken landsick two hours after stepping on shore, and had as thorough a casting up of accounts for an hour as any of us experienced on the steamer at sea. The Cunard steamers generally arrive at, or used to arrive at, Queenstown on Sunday mornings, and all who land are eager to get breakfast ashore. We tried the Queen's Hotel, where we got a very fair breakfast, and were charged six or eight shillings for the privilege of the ladies sitting in a room till the meal was ready for us--the first, and I think the only, positive swindle I experienced in Ireland. After breakfast the first ride on an English (or rather Irish) railway train took us to Cork. The road was through a lovely country, and, although it was the first of May, green with verdure as with us in June--no harsh New England east winds; and one can easily see in this country how May-day came to be celebrated with May-queens, dances, and May-poles.
To us, just landed from the close steamer, how grateful was the fragrance of the fresh earth, the newly-blossomed trees, and the hedges all alive with twittering sparrows! The country roads were smooth, hard, and clear as a ball-room floor; the greensward, fresh and bright, rolled up in luxuriant waves to the very foot of the great brown-trunked trees; chapel bells were tolling, and we saw the Irish peasantry trudging along to church, for all the world as though they had just stepped out of the pictures in the story-books. There were the women with blue-gray cloaks, with hoods at the back, and broad white caps, men in short corduroys, brogues, bobtail coats, caubeens and shillalah; then there was an occasional little tip-cart of the costermonger and his wife, drawn by a donkey; the jaunting-car, with half a dozen merry occupants, all forming the moving figures in the rich landscape of living green in herbage, and the soft brown of the half moss-covered stone walls, or the corrugated stems of the great trees.