The cases of some of these tenants were instructive.  One poor man, Knowles, had gone out to America, and regularly sent home money to his family to pay the rent.  They found other uses for it, and when the storm came he was two years and a half in arrears.  In another instance, two brothers held contiguous holdings, and were in a manner partners.  One was fonder of Athy than of agriculture; the other a steady husbandman.  Four years’ arrears had grown up against the one; only a half-year’s gale against the other.  Clearly this difference originated outside of the fall of prices!  In a third case, a tenant wrote to Mr. Trench begging to have something done, as he had the money to pay, and wanted to pay, but “didn’t dare.”

From Mr. Dunne’s we drove to Mr. Kilbride’s, another ample, very comfortable house—­not so thoroughly well fitted up with bathroom and other modern appurtenances as Mr. Dunne’s perhaps—­but still a very good house.  It stands on a large green knoll, rather bare of trees, and commands a fine sweep of landscape.

Mr. Hutchins drove me to the little road which leads up past the “Land League village” to the house of Father Maher, and there set me down.

I walked up and found the curate at home—­a tall, slender, well-made young priest, with a keen, intelligent face.  He received me very politely, and, when I showed him the card of an eminent dignitary of the Church, with cordiality.

I found him full of sympathy with the people of his parish, but neither vehement nor unfair.  He did not deny that there were tenants on Lord Lansdowne’s estate who were amply able to pay their rents; but he did most emphatically assert that there were not a few of them who really could not pay their rents.

“I assure you,” he said, “there are some of them who cannot even pay their dues to their priest, and when I say that, you will know how pinched and driven they must indeed be.”  It was in view of these tenants that he seemed to justify the course of Mr. Dunne and Mr. Kilbride.  “They must all stand or fall together.”  He had nothing to say to the discredit of Lord Lansdowne; but he spoke with some bitterness of the agent, Mr. Townsend Trench, as having protested against Lord Lansdowne’s making reductions here while he had himself made the same reductions on the neighbouring estate of Mrs. Adair.

“In truth,” he said, “Mr. Trench has made all this trouble worse all along.  He is too much of a Napoleon”—­and with a humorous twinkle in his eye as he spoke—­“too much of a Napoleon the Third.

“I was just reading his father’s book when you came in.  Here it is,” and he handed me a copy of Trench’s Realities of Irish Life.

“Did you ever read it?  This Mr. Trench, the father, was a kind of Napoleon among agents in his own time, and the son, you see, thinks it ought to be understood that he is quite as great a man as his father.  Did you never hear how he found a lot of his father’s manuscripts once, and threw them all in the fire, calling out as he did so, ’There goes some more of my father’s vanity?’”