After luncheon I ordered a car, and drove to Derrybeg, to call there on Father M’Fadden, Lord Ernest, who has already seen him, agreeing to call there for me on his return from a walk.  We passed much reclaimed bogland, mostly now in grass, and looking fairly well; many piles of turf and clusters of cottages, well-built, but not very neatly kept.  From each, as we passed, the inevitable cur rushed out and barked himself hoarse.  Then came a waste of bog and boulders, and then a long, neat stone wall, well coped with unhewn stone, which announced the vicinity of Father M’Fadden’s house, quite the best structure in the place after the chapel and the hotel.  It is of stone, with a neat side porch, in which, as I drove up, I descried Father M’Fadden, in his trim well-fitting clerical costume, standing and talking with an elderly lady.  I passed through a handsome iron wicket, and introduced myself to him.  He received me with much courtesy, and asked me to walk into his well-furnished comfortable study, where a lady, his sister, to whom he presented me, sat reading by the fire.

I told Father M’Fadden I had come to get his view of methods and things at Gweedore, and he gave it to me with great freedom and fluency.  He is a typical Celt in appearance, a M’Fadden Roe, sanguine by temperament, with an expression at once shrewd and enthusiastic, a most flexible persuasive voice.  All the trouble at Gweedore, he thought, came of the agents.  “Agents had been the curse both of Ireland and of the landlord.  The custom being to pay them by commissions on the sums collected, and not a regular salary, the more they can screw either out of the soil, or out of any other resources of the tenants, the better it is for them.  At Gweedore the people earn what they can, not out of the soil, but out of their labour exported to Scotland, or England, or America.  Only yesterday,” he continued, turning to his neat mahogany desk and taking up a letter, “I received this with a remittance from America to pay the rent of one of my people.”

“This was in connection,” I asked, “with the ‘Plan of Campaign’ and your contest here?”

“Yes,” he replied; “and a girl of my parish went over to Scotland herself and got the money due there for another family, and brought it back to me here.  You see they make me a kind of savings-bank, and have done so for a long time, long before the ‘Plan of Campaign’ was talked about as it is now.”

This was interesting, as I had heard it said by a Nationalist in Dublin that the “Plan of Campaign” was originally suggested by Father M’Fadden.  He made no such claim himself, however, and I made no allusion to this aspect of the matter.  “I have been living here for fifteen years, and they listen to me as to nobody else.”