’That is over and above the 4 s. 6 d.?—­Yes.

’Did you ever pay more than 6 s. 8 d. for the bog in the late agent’s time?—­He took the good bog off us; we were paying 6 s. 8 d. for it.  They left us to the bad bog, and we do not pay so high for that.

’Was the good bog dearer or cheaper than the bad bog at 4 s. 6 d.?—­Half a rood of the good bog was worth half an acre or an acre of the other.  The bad bog smokes so we have often to leave the house:  we cannot stay in it unless there is a good draught in the chimney.’

The Rev. Thomas Smollan, P.P., has published a letter to the Earl of Dunraven, a Catholic Peer, to whom Mr. Trench has dedicated his book.  In this letter the parish priest of Farney says:—­

’In pages 63 and 64 Mr. Trench tells his readers that on the very night the news of the late agent’s sudden death, in the county courthouse of Monaghan, reached Carrickmacross, “fires blazed on almost every hill on the Shirley estate, and over a district of more than 20,000 acres there was scarcely a mile without a bonfire blazing in manifestation of joy at his decease.”  This paragraph, my lord, taken by itself and unexplained in any way, would at once imply that the people were inhuman, almost savages, whom Mr. Trench was sent to tame—­that they were insensible to the agent’s sudden death, a death so sudden that it would make an enemy almost relent.  Mr. Trench assigns no cause for this strange proceeding except what we read in page 64, and what he learned from the chief clerk, viz., “that the people were much excited, that they were ground down to the last point by the late agent, and they were threatening to rise in rebellion against him,” &c.  One would think that Mr. Trench having learned so much on such authority, would have set to work to try and find out the cause of the discontent and apply a remedy.  He does not say in his book that he did so, but seems still unable to understand this to him incomprehensible proceeding.  However, I am of opinion that Mr. Trench knew the whole of it, if not then at all events before “The Realities” saw the light, for in a speech of his, when Lord Bath visited Farney (page 383), he said, “A dog could not bark on the estate without it coming to his knowledge.”  And therefore I say that a man so inquisitive as to find out the barking of a dog on the Bath estate, who had so many sources of information close at hand, could not have been long without knowing the causes of the “excitement, threatened rebellion, bonfires, &c., on the Shirley estate,” if he had only wished for the information.  Either he knew the cause of all this when he wrote his book, or he did not.  If he did, I say he was bound in fair play to tell it to the public; if he did not know it his self-laudation in his speech goes for nought.  But, my lord, with your permission, I will inform your lordship, Mr. Trench, and the public, as to some of the causes of so remarkable an occurrence, which