I told him that this trick was not altogether unknown amongst us; adding that I had even seen it carried out so skilfully, that one farmer managed to “get away” forty or fifty oxen and cows in one night. This anecdote seemed to interest him immensely, and to confirm his high opinion of France.
“Ah, your honour,” said he, “the French are a great people!”
He then inquired whether we also had a Land League--he pronounced it _lague_--and was rather astonished when I told him that with us a tenant who could not pay always tried to leave, and that often, particularly just now, it was the landlords who compelled the tenants to remain in their farms. We agreed at once that landlords _are a very bad lot, all the world over_; he shook my hand with a vigour that nearly dislocated the arm, and we parted the best friends in the world.
I have forgotten one detail which is worth quoting. When I asked Mr. Patrick Hogan how he passed his time, he confided to me that he had taken some lands situate some distance from here. He held them at a very low price, and had managed to relet them at higher rents to three under-tenants. I asked him if he had not some trouble with his tenants. “Ah!” he answered; “I should like to see them refuse to pay me!” A reply that completely capsized all my notions of right and wrong, already much shaken by everything that I had heard and seen in this singular country!
[(April, 1887.) I have received from Ireland a request to rectify an error, which I hasten to do at once. I said that the Limerick butcher who took Colonel M----’s field, found his cows’ tails cut off. It appears that this misfortune happened to the cows of a neighbour under the same circumstances. The butcher hastened to withdraw his cows from the boycotted meadows before they suffered the same fate.
Neither was it Colonel M----’s would-be assassin who, when lying in a hospital in America, declared to his confessor that he had been paid by means of a subscription in which all the tenants on the estate had joined. The story is true, but it is applicable to another case.]
LIMERICK--ADMIRABLE SELF-DEVOTION OF THE IRISH PIGS--THE AGENTS--MALLOW--KILLARNEY--HOW ONE TRAVELS IN KERRY--MUCKROSS ABBEY--AN IRISH HUT--DERRYGARIFF--THE ORIGIN OF AN ESTATE--THE DRAMA OF GLENVEIGH--A DINNER IN KERRY.