The Milesian deposits all garbage and filth before his house door here, as he was accustomed to do at home, and so accumulates the pools and dirt-heaps which disfigure the working-people’s quarters and poison the air. He builds a pigsty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with himself. This new and unnatural method of cattle-raising in cities is wholly of Irish origin. The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. Otherwise, he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it, as anyone may see a thousand times repeated in all the great towns of England.
The filth and comfortlessness that prevail in the houses themselves it is impossible to describe.
The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. A piece of wood, a broken chair, an old chest for a table, more he needs not; a teakettle, a few pots and dishes, equip his kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room.
When he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, doorposts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney. Moreover, why should he need much room? At home in his mud-cabin there was only one room for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need in England.
So the custom of crowding many persons into a single room, now so universal, has been chiefly implanted by the Irish immigration.
And since the poor devil must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him out of all others, he betakes himself to the drinking of spirits.