Near Bolton’s farm we passed the holding of a tenant named Kavanagh, one of the three who were “allowed” to pay their rents.  Several Land League huts are on his place, and the evicted people who occupy them put their cattle with his.  He is a quiet, cautious man, and very reticent.  But it seemed to me that he was not entirely satisfied with the “squatters” who have been quartered upon him.  And it appears that he has taken another holding in Carlow.  From his place we drove to Ballyfad, where a large house, at the end of a good avenue of trees, once the mansion of a squire, but now much dilapidated, is occupied as headquarters by the police.  Here we found Mr. George Freeman, the bailiff of the Coolgreany property, a strong, sturdy man, much disgusted at finding it necessary to go about protected by two policemen.  That this was necessary, however, he admitted, pointing out to us the place where one Kinsella was killed not very long ago.  The son of this man Kinsella was formerly one of Mr. Brooke’s gamekeepers, and is now, Mr. Freeman thinks, in concert with another man named Ryan, the chief stay of the League in keeping up its dominion over the evicted tenants.

Many of these tenants, he believes, would gladly pay their rents now, and come back if they dared.

“Every man, sir,” he said, “that has anything to lose, would be glad to come back next Monday if he thought his life would be safe.  But all the lazy and thriftless ones are better off now than they ever were; they get from L4 to L6 a month, with nothing to do, and so they’re in clover, and they naturally don’t like to have the industrious, well-to-do tenants spoil their fun by making a general settlement.”

“Besides that,” he added, “that man Kinsella and his comrade Ryan are the terror of the whole of them.  Kinsella always was a curious, silent, moody fellow.  He knows every inch of the country, going over it all the time by night and day as a gamekeeper, and I am quite sure the Parnellite men and the Land Leaguers are just as much afraid of him and Ryan as the tenants are.  He don’t care a bit for them; and they’ve no control of him at all.”

Mr. Freeman said he remembered very well the occasion referred to by Father O’Neill, when Captain Hamilton refused to confer with Dr. Dillon and himself.

“Did Father O’Neill tell you, sir,” he said, “that Captain Hamilton was quite willing to talk with him and Father O’Donel, the parish priests, and with the Coolgreany people, but he would have nothing to say to any one who was not their priest, and had no business to be meddling with the matter at all?”

“No; he did not tell me that.”

“Ah! well, sir, that made all the difference.  Father Dunphy, who was there, is a high-tempered man, and he said he had just as much right to represent the tenants as Captain Hamilton to represent the landlord, and that Captain Hamilton wouldn’t allow.  It was the outside people made all the trouble.  In June of last year there was a conference at my house, and all that time there was a Committee sitting at Coolgreany, and the tenants would not be allowed to do anything without the Committee.”