None but the Irish will build near the Irish; and the infection of
fear spreads to the elder Yankee homes about, and the owners prepare to
abandon them,--not always, however, let us hope, without turning, at the
expense of the invaders, a Parthian penny in their flight. In my walk from
Dublin to North Charlesbridge, I saw more than one token of the
encroachment of the Celtic army, which had here and there invested a
Yankee house with besieging shanties on every side, and thus given to its
essential and otherwise quite hopeless ugliness a touch of the poetry that
attends failing fortunes, and hallows decayed gentility of however poor a
sort originally. The fortunes of such a house are, of course, not to be
retrieved. Where the Celt sets his foot, there the Yankee (and it is
perhaps wholesome if not agreeable to know that the Irish citizen whom we
do not always honor as our equal in civilization loves to speak of us
scornfully as Yankees) rarely, if ever, returns. The place remains to the
intruder and his heirs forever.
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