But the lady insisted, and the men finally went off on their quest.  In the course of half an hour it was rewarded.  The mad woman—­a dangerous creature—­who had wandered away from an asylum in the neighbourhood, was found curled up and fast asleep in the lady’s own bed!

Fancy a delicate woman going alone into her bedroom at midnight to be suddenly confronted by an apparition of that sort!

BORRIS, March 3d.—­After a stroll on the lawn this morning, the wide and glorious prospect bathed in the light of a really soft spring day, I had a conversation with Mr. Kavanagh about the Land Corporation, of which he is the guiding spirit.  This is a defensive organisation of the Irish landlords against the Land League.  When a landlord has been driven into evicting his tenants, the next step, in the “war against landlordism,” is to prevent other tenants from taking the vacated lands and cultivating them.  This is accomplished by “boycotting” any man who does this as a “land-grabber.”

The ultimate sanction of the “boycott” being “murder,” derelict farms increased under this system very rapidly; and the Eleventh Commandment of the League, “Thou shalt not pay the rent which thy neighbour hath refused to pay,” was in a fair way to dethrone the Ten Commandments of Sinai throughout Ireland, even before the formal adoption in 1886 of the “Plan of Campaign.”

Mr. Gladstone would perhaps have hit the facts more accurately, if, instead of calling an eviction in Ireland a “sentence of death,” he had called the taking of a tenancy a sentence of death.  Mr. Hussey at Lixnaw had two tenants, Edmond and James Fitzmaurice.  Edmond Fitzmaurice was “evicted” in May 1887; but he was taken into the house of a neighbour, made very comfortable, and still lives.  James Fitzmaurice took, for the sake of the family, the land from which Edmond was evicted, and for this he was denounced as a “land-grabber,” boycotted, and finally shot dead in the presence of his daughter.

At a meeting in Dublin in the autumn of 1885, a parish priest, the Rev. Mr. Cantwell, described it as a “cardinal virtue” that “no one should take a farm from which another had been evicted,” and called upon the people who heard him to “pass any such man by unnoticed, and treat him as an enemy in their midst.”  Public opinion and the law, if not the authorities of his church would make short work of any priest who talked in this fashion in New York.  But in Ireland, and under the British Government, it seems they order things differently.  So it occurred one day to the landlords thus assailed, as it did to the sea-lions of the Cape of Good Hope when the French sailors attacked them, that they might defend themselves.

To this end the Land Corporation was instituted, with a considerable capital at its back, and Mr. Kavanagh at its head.  The “plan of campaign” of this Corporation is to take over from the landlords derelict lands and cultivate them, stocking them where that is necessary.