am told, under the advice of his oldest son, the late Lord Dunkellin, one of the most charming and deservedly popular men of his time.  He was a great friend and admirer of Father Burke, whom he used to claim as a Galway cousin, and with whom I met him in Rome not long before his death in the summer of 1867.  His brother, the present Marquis, I have never met, but Mr. Tener, his present agent here, who passed some time in America several years ago, learning from him that I wished to see this place, very courteously wrote to me asking me to make his house my headquarters.  I found my way through queer passages to a cheery little hall where my host met me, and taking me into a pleasant little parlour, enlivened by flowers, and a merrily blazing fire, presented me to Mrs. Tener.

Mr. Tener is an Ulster man from the County Cavan.  He went with his wife on their bridal trip to America, and what he there saw of the peremptory fashion in which the authorities deal with conspiracies to resist the law seems not unnaturally to have made him a little impatient of the dilatory, not to say dawdling, processes of the law in his own country.  He gave me a very interesting account after dinner this evening of the situation in which he found affairs on this property, an account very different from those which I have seen in print.  He is himself the owner of a small landed property in Cavan, and he has had a good deal of experience as an agent for other properties.  “I have a very simple rule,” he said to me, “in dealing with Irish tenants, and that is neither to do an injustice nor to submit to one.”  It was only, he said, after convincing himself that the Clanricarde tenants had no legitimate ground of complaint against the management of the estate, not removable upon a fair and candid discussion of all the issues involved between them and himself, that he consented to take charge of the property.  That to do this was to run a certain personal risk, in the present state of the country, he was quite aware.

But he takes this part of the contract very coolly, telling me that the only real danger, he thinks, is incurred when he makes a journey of which he has to send a notice by telegraph—­a remark which recalled to me the curious advice given me in Dublin to seal my letters, as a protection against “the Nationalist clerks in the post-offices.”  The park of Portumua Castle, which is very extensive, is patrolled by armed policemen, and whenever Mr. Tener drives out he is followed by a police car carrying two armed men.

“Against whom are all these precautions necessary?” I asked.  “Against the evicted tenants, or against the local agents of the League?”