After lunch, the Colonel took me for a drive. We first went ten or twelve miles to visit Sir Croker Barrington’s beautiful seat. The Castle is placed in the midst of a lovely park; it is modern, but it has several towers, machicolations, and battlements, which give it a look of feudal ferocity, completed by four or five old cannon, placed like a battery on the terrace which overlooks the road we drove up by. Alas! they did not suffice to intimidate the Land Leaguers of the neighbourhood; for one morning, three or four years ago, they came in broad daylight and organised a battue in the park. They killed all the deer without any one daring to oppose them. The deer have since been replaced, and we have even seen some of them. But what was done at Sir Croker Barrington’s is repeated, more or less, in all directions, on a smaller scale. In many counties it is now impossible to preserve at all. Poaching is openly carried on.
“We ourselves, the landlords, are now the game,” said the Colonel in a melancholy tone, “and for us there is no close season.”
However, sometimes the game resists. The instance of a Mr. Carden was quoted to me, who at last succeeded in getting the best of the whole population.
Like every one else, he had serious difficulties with his tenants, who would neither pay their rents nor leave their farms. He had been shot at several times, but had never been hit. One day he was riding on the Nenagh road in full daylight, when, at the same moment, he heard two balls whistle past his ears. The would-be murderers were two men who had fired from a neighbouring field, and who ran away seeing that they had missed their aim. Mr. Carden jumped his horse over the wall and pursued them. He stunned the first with a blow from his loaded horse-whip, then throwing himself upon the second, he managed to knock him down with blows of his fists. He bound them together with his stirrup-leathers, and triumphantly conveyed them to Nenagh prison. Wonderful to relate, the jury, suddenly carried away by his courage, consented to find them guilty, and they were hanged!
Mr. Carden had another rather droll adventure with his tenants. One day, during the Fenian insurrection, he was warned that the inhabitants of the neighbouring village, taking the Socialist theories in earnest, had divided his park between them, and intended solemnly coming to take possession on the following Monday. Mr. Carden, assisted by his men-servants, immediately carried an old cannon, worked on a pivot, that he possessed, to an upper room. On the day named the tenants arrived with horses and carts, and commenced, in presence of an immense crowd, to dig up the lawn. At this moment they heard a window open, and they saw Mr. Carden ostentatiously leading his cannon up to the mouth with packets of grape-shot. He then turned round, drew out his watch, and informed the spectators that he gave them ten minutes to get away in. They did not require five, and no one has since dreamt of digging up Mr. Carden’s lawn.