Of the country about Kilkenny, I am told, as of the country about Carlow, that nearly or quite seventy per cent, of the labourers are dependent upon the landlords from November to May for such employment as they get.

The shopkeepers, too, are in a bad way, being in many cases reduced to the condition of mere agents of the great wholesale houses elsewhere, and kept going by these houses mainly in the hope of recovering old debts.  There is a severe pressure of usury, too, upon the farmers.  “If a farmer,” said one resident to me, “wants to borrow a small sum of the Loan Fund Bank, he must have two securities—­one of them a substantial man good for the debt.  These two indorsers must be ‘treated’ by the borrower whom they back; and he must pay them a weekly sum for the countenance they have given him, which not seldom amounts, before he gets through with the matter, to a hundred per cent, on the original loan.”

I am assured too that the consumption of spirits all through this region has greatly increased of late years.  “The official reports will show you,” said one gentleman, “that the annual outlay upon whisky in Ireland equals the sum saved to the tenants by the reductions in rent.”  This is a proposition so remarkable that I simply record it for future verification, as having been made by a very quiet, cool, and methodical person, whose information on other points I have found to be correct.  He tells me too, as of his own knowledge, that in going over some financial matters with a small farmer in his neighbourhood, he ascertained, beyond a peradventure, that this farmer annually spent in whisky, for the use of his family, consisting of himself, his wife and three adult children, nearly, or quite, seventy pounds a year!  “You won’t believe this,” he said to me; “and if you print the statement nobody else will believe it; but for all that it is the simple unexaggerated truth.”

Falstaff’s reckoning at Dame Quickly’s becomes a moderate score in comparison with this!

I spent half an hour again in the muniment-room at Kilkenny Castle, where, in the Expense-Book of the second Duke of Ormond, I found a supper menu worthy of record, as illustrating what people meant by “keeping open house” in the great families of the time of Queen Anne.[Note L.]

Taking a train early in the afternoon, I came on here in time to dine last night with Mr. Rolleston of Delgany, an uncompromising Protestant “Home Ruler”—­as Protestant and as uncompromising as John Mitchel—­whose recent pamphlet on “Boycotting” has deservedly attracted so much attention on both sides of the Irish Sea.