Court and had judicial rents fixed; and it was on the contention promoted by the two priests, through these judicial tenants, he said, that all the difficulty hinged.  Father M’Fadden of Glena, who thought the quarrel unjustifiable and silly, had an interview with Mr. Blane, M.P., and with Father Stephens, and tried to arrange it all.  He would have succeeded, my Galwegian thought, had not the agent, Mr. Hewson, obstinately fought with the obstinate curate, Father Stephens, over the suggestion made by the latter, that the terms granted on the fine neighbouring estate of Mr. Stuart of Ards—­a man of wealth, who lives mainly at Brighton, though Ards is one of the loveliest places in Ireland—­should be extended by Mr. Olphert for a whole year to his own people, who had never asked for anything of the kind!

Mr. Olphert said he knew Gweedore well.  He owns a “townland"[16] there, on which he has thirty-five tenants, none of them on a holding at more more than L4 a year.  Father M’Fadden of Gweedore, he said, finding that the people on Mr. Olphert’s townland were going back to the “Rundale” practices, tried to induce Mr. Olphert to return all these subdivisions as “tenancies.”  This he refused to do.  As to the resources of the peasantry, he thought them greater than they appeared to be.  “This comes to light,” said Mr. Olphert, “whenever there is a tenant-right for sale.  There is never any lack of money to buy it, and at a round good price.”  The people also, he thinks, spend a great deal on what they regard as luxuries, and particularly on tea.  “A cup of tea could not be got for love or money in Gweedore, when Lord George Hill came there.  You might as well have asked for a glass of Tokay.”

Now they use and abuse it in the most deleterious way imaginable.  They buy the tea at exorbitant rates, often at five shillings a pound, and usually on credit, paying a part of one bill on running up another, put it into a saucepan or an iron pot, and boil, or rather stew, it over the fire, till they brew a kind of hell-broth, which they imbibe at odd moments all day long!  Oddly enough, this is the way in which they prepare tea in Cashmere and other parts of India, with this essential difference, though, that the Orientals mitigate the astringency of the herb with milk and almonds and divers ingredients, tending to make a sort of “compote” of it.  Taken as it is taken here, it must have a tremendous effect on the nerves.  Mr. Olphert thinks it has had much to do with the increase of lunacy in Ireland of late years.  From his official connection with the asylum at Letterkenny, he knows that while it used to accommodate the lunatics of three counties, it is now hardly adequate to the needs of Donegal alone.