was granted him.  The agent afterwards found that the piece of land in question was by far the best of the surrendered holding.  But that is a mere detail.  This ingenious tenant Barry, living now on another estate just outside the grasp of the agent, has systematically “boycotted” for the last nine years the land which he gave up, feeding his own cattle upon it freely meanwhile, and keeping all would-be tenants at a distance!  “He is now,” said the agent, “quite a wealthy man in his way, jobbing cattle at all the great markets!”

“When the eviction of Sweeney took place,” said the agent, “I was present in person, as I thought I ought to be, and the result is that I have been held up to the execration of mankind as a monster for putting out a child in a cradle into a storm.  As a matter of fact,” he said, “there was a cradle in the way, which the sheriff-Officer gently took up, and by direction of the tenant’s wife removed.  I made no remark about it at all, but a local paper published a lying story, which the publisher had to retract, that I had said ‘Throw out the child!’”

“Two priests,” he said, “came quite uninvited and certainly without provocation, to see me, and one of them shouted out, ’Ah! we know you’ll be making another Coolgreany,’ which was as much as to say there ’would be bloodshed.’  This was the more intolerable,” he added, “that, as I afterwards found, I had already done for the sake of the tenants precisely what these ecclesiastics professed that they had come to ask me to do!

“For thirty years,” said this gentleman, “I have lived in the midst of these people—­and in all that time I have never had so much as a threatening letter.  But after this story was published of my throwing out a cradle with a child in it, I was insulted in the street by a woman whom I had never seen before.  Two girls, too, called out at the eviction, ’You’ve bad pluck; why didn’t you tell us you were coming down the day?’ and another woman made me laugh by crying after me, ’You’ve two good-looking daughters, but you’re a bad man yourself.’”

Quite as instructive is the story given me on this occasion of the Tyaquin estate in the county of Galway.  This estate is managed by an agent, Mr. Eichardson of Castle Coiner, in this county of Kilkenny.

The rents on this Galway estate, as Mr. Richardson assures me, have been unaltered for between thirty and forty years, and some of them for even a longer period.  For the last twenty-five years certainty, during which Mr. Richardson has been the agent of the estate, and probably, he thinks, for many years previous, there has never been a case of the non-payment of rent, except in recent years when rents were withheld for a time for political reasons.

Large sums of money have been laid out in various useful improvements.  Constant occupation was given to those requiring it, until the agrarian agitation became fully developed.  On the demesne and the home farms the best systems of reclaiming waste lands and the best systems of agriculture were practically exhibited, so that the estate was an agricultural free school for all who cared to learn.