‘Is it very dangerous?’

’Very; and now let me tell you that it is all-important that the temperature of the room should not be allowed to vary.  I attended a case of it some three or four miles from here, but the damp of the cabin was so great that it was impossible to combat the disease.  The cottage, or rather hovel, was built on the edge of a soft spongy bog, and so wet was it that the woman had to sweep the water every morning from the floor, where it collected in great pools.  I am now going to visit an evicted family, who are living in a partially roofed shed fenced up by the roadside.  The father is down with fever, and lies shivering, with nothing to drink but cold water.  His wife told me that last week it rained so heavily that she had to get up three times in the night to wring the sheets out.’

‘And why were they evicted?’

’Oh, that is a long story; but it is a singularly characteristic one.  In the first place, he was an idle fellow; he got into difficulties and owed his landlord three years’ rent.  Then he got into bad hands, and was prevented from coming to terms with his landlord.  There was a lot of jobbing going on between the priest and the village grocer, and finally it was arranged that the latter should pay off the existing debt if the landlord could be forced into letting him the farm at a “fair rent,” that is to say, thirty per cent reduction on the old rent.  In recognition of his protecting influence, the priest was to take a third of the farm off the grocer’s hands, and the two were then to conjointly rack-rent poor Murphy for the remaining third portion, which he would be allowed to retain for a third of the original rent; but the National League heard of their little tricks, and now the farm is boycotted, and Murphy is dying in the ditch for the good of his counthry.’

‘I thought boycotting was ended, that the League had lost all power.’

’It has and it hasn’t.  Sometimes a man takes a farm and keeps it in defiance of his neighbours; sometimes they hunt him out of it.  It is hard to come to a conclusion, for when in one district you hear of rents being paid and boycotted farms letting freely, in another, only a few miles away, the landlords are giving reductions, and there are farms lying waste that no one dare look at.  In my opinion the fire is only smouldering, and when the Coercion Act expires the old organization will rise up as strong and as triumphant as before.  This is a time of respite for both parties.’

The conversation then came to a sudden pause.  Alice felt it would be out of place for her to speak her sympathies for the Nationalistic cause, and she knew it would be unfair to lead the doctor to express his.  So at the end of a long silence, during which each divined the other’s thoughts, she said: 

’I suppose you see a great deal of the poor and the miseries they endure?’

’I have had good opportunities of studying them.  Before I came here I spent ten years in the poorest district in Donegal.  I am sure there wasn’t a gentleman’s house within fifteen miles of me.’