We had seen a good deal of merriment on the roads between Dublin and Limerick: schoolchildren of all ages trotted gaily—many of them barefoot—through the October rain; they came out of lanes, you could see them approaching between hedges along muddy paths; children without number forming like drops into a rivulet, the rivulets forming streams, the streams little rivers—and sometimes the car drove through them as if through a river that parted readily. For a few minutes the road would remain empty, when the car had just passed through a slightly larger village, and then the drops began collecting again: Irish schoolchildren, jostling and chasing each other, often enterprisingly dressed, in variegated bits and pieces, but all of them, even those who were not merry, were at least relaxed; they often traipse for miles like that through the rain, and home again through the rain, carrying their hurling sticks, their books held together by a strap. For over a hundred miles the car drove through Irish schoolchildren, and although it was raining, and many of them were barefoot, most of them poorly dressed, almost all of them seemed cheerful.It had seemed blasphemous when someone once said to me in Germany: The road belongs to the automobile.
