about signing the agreement.  He gives, and can be got to give, no reason for this; but when we drove up he came out to greet us in the most friendly manner.  We went in and found his wife, a shrewd, sharp-eyed, little old dame, with whom * * * * fell into a confabulation, while I went into the next room with the labourer himself.  The house was neatly furnished—­with little ornaments and photographs on the mantel-shelf, and nothing of the happy-go-lucky look so common about the houses of the working people in Ireland, as well as about the houses of the lesser squires.

I paid him a compliment on the appearance of his house and grounds.  “Yes, sir!” he answered:  “it’s a very good place it is, and * * * * has built it just to please us.”

“But I am told you want to leave it?”

“Ah, no, that is not so, sir, indeed at all!  We’ve three children you see, sir, in America—­two girls and a boy we have.”

“And where are they?”

“Ah, the girls they’re not in any factory at all.  They’re like leddies, living out in a place they call * * in Massachusetts; and the lad, he was on a farm there.  But we don’t know where he is nor his sisters any more just now.  And the wife, she thinks she would like to go out to America and see the children.”

“Do you hear from them regularly?”

“Well, it’s only a few pounds they send, but they’re doing very well.  Domestics they are, quite like leddies; there’s their pictures on the shelf.”

“But what would you do there?”

“Ah! we’d have lodgings, the wife says, sir.  But I like the ould place myself.”

“I think you are quite right there,” I replied.  “And do you get work here from the farmers as the labourers do in my country?”

“Work from the farmers, sir?” he answered, rather sharply.  “What they can’t help we get, but no more!  If the farmers in America is like them, it’s not I would be going there!  The farmers!  For the farmers, a labourer, sir, is not of the race of Adam!  They think any place good enough for a labourer—­any place and any food!  Is the farmers that way in America?”

“Well, I don’t know that they are so very much more liberal than your farmers are,” I replied; “but I think they’d have to treat you as being of the race of Adam!  But are not the farmers here, or the Guardians, obliged to build houses for the labourers?  I thought there was an Act of Parliament about that?”

“And so there is but what’s the good of it?  It’s just to get the labourers’ votes, and then they fool the labourers, just making them quarrel about where the cottages shall be, what they call the ‘sites’; and then there’s no cottages built at all, at all.  It’s the lawyers, you see, sir, gets in with the farmers—­the strongest farmers—­and then they just make fools of the labourers as if there was no Act of Parliament at all.”

“But if the labourers want to go away, to emigrate,” I said, “as you want to do, to America, don’t the farmers, or the Government, or the landlords, help them to get away and make a start?”