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Updated: May 9, 2025
The ground on which is I trod was hallowed by recollections of the past, and as I slowly wandered through the long alley of poplars, which, like so many birch-brooms standing on end, diffused a melancholy and lugubrious shade, my imagination drew a contrast between the surrounding scenery, and what it was in the classic days of our forefathers.
This is equal in size to the canoe-birch, often growing seventy feet high, with a trunk of nearly three feet diameter. Its branches are long, slender, and pendulous; and it is from the twigs of this species that most of the "birch-brooms" used in America are made. It usually grows in very cold or mountainous regions, and is the smallest of these interesting trees.
The town looked gray, cold, and forbidding in the bleak October morning, when Ida found herself alone amidst its stoniness, the native population only just beginning to bestir itself in the street above the quay, and making believe, by an inordinate splashing and a frantic vehemence in the use of birch-brooms, to be the cleanest population under the sun; an assertion of superiority somewhat belied by an all-pervading odour of decomposed vegetable matter, a small heap of which refuse, including egg-shells and fishy offal which the town in the matutinal cleansing process offered up to the sun-god as incense upon an altar lay before every door, to be collected by the local scavenger at his leisure, or to be blown about and disseminated by the winds of heaven.
Potatoes grown on the coast were frequently sent to Dublin by sea; and Lord Tyrone told Arthur Young at Curraghmore, that much of the potatoes grown about Dungarvan were sent thither, together with birch-brooms. The boats were said to be freighted with fruit and timber!
In this miserable position of our affairs, and when we should have found ourselves very cold, if we had not been so hungry, and very hungry if we had not been so cold, an Hibernian mercantile vessel passed us, laden with timber and fruit, viz. potatoes and birch-brooms, and they very kindly and opportunely threw us a tow-rope.
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