In another case an agent, Mr. Ivough, had to deal with a body of five hundred tenants on a considerable estate.  Of these tenants, two hundred settled their rents with the landlord before the passing of the Land Act of 1881, and valuations made by the landlord’s valuer, with their full assent.  There was no business for the lawyers, so far as they were concerned, and no compulsion of any sort was put on them.  Among them was a man who had married the daughter of an old tenant on the estate, and so came into a holding of 12 Irish, or more than 20 statute, acres, at a rental of L18 a year.  The valuer reduced this to L14, 10s., which satisfied the tenant, and as the agent agreed to make this reduced valuation retroactive, all went as smoothly as possible for two years, when the tenant began to fall into arrears.  When the Sub-Commissioners, between 1885 and 1887, took to making sweeping reductions, the tenants who had settled freely under the recent valuation grumbled bitterly.  As one of them tersely put it to the agent, “We were a parcel of bloody fools, and you ought to have told us these Sub-Commissioners were coming!” Mr. Sweeney, the tenant by marriage already mentioned, was not content to express his particular dissatisfaction in idle words, but kept on going into arrears.  In May 1888 things came to a crisis.  The agent refused to accept a settlement which included the payment by him of the costs of the proceedings forced upon him by his tenant.  “You have had a good holding,” said the agent, “with plenty of water and good land.  In this current year two acres of your wheat will pay the whole rent.  You have broken up and sold bit by bit a mill that was on the place; and above all, when Mr. Gladstone made us accept the judicial rents, he told us we might be sure, if we did this, of punctual payment.  That was the one consideration held out to us.  And we are entitled to that!”

The tenant being out of his holding, the agent wishes to put another tenant into it.  But the holding is “boycotted.”  Several tenants are anxious for it, and would gladly take it, but they dare not The great evicted will neither sell any tenant-right he may have, nor pay his arrears and costs, nor give up the place to another tenant.  To put Property Defence men on the holding would cost the landlord L2, 10s. a week, and do him no great good, as the evicted man “holds the fort,” being established in a house which he occupies on an adjoining property, and for which presumably he pays his rent.  It seems as if Mr. Sweeney were inspired by the example of another tenant, named Barry, who, before the passing of the Land Act of 1881, gave up freely a holding of 20 acres, on a property managed by Mr. Kough; but as he was on such good terms with the agent that he could borrow money of him, he begged the agent to let him retain at a low rent a piece of this surrendered land directly adjoining his house.  He asked this in the name of his eight or nine children, and it