lease into your keeping.  You would not receive your rents, except in gold, or which you made the wretched people pay, ruinous, murderous premium, by selling it but to them from day to day.  You—­in fact have now neither time nor patience to enumerate your monstrous corruptions and robberies, although I know them all, as you shall find ere long.  There is one act, however, so refined in diabolical depravity, so deeply narked by a spirit of cowardice, revenge, and cruelty, that I might almost question whether, in the lowest depths of hell itself, anything so damnably black and satanic could originate—­I allude to the plan which you conceived and got executed by your heartless, cowardly son, aided by that old woman who stands therein your presence, for ruining the stainless reputation of Mr. M’Loughlin’s only daughter.”

“I can prove that,” said Poll, “and here I am ready and willing to do so.”

“In this, however, thank God, you have failed,” he continued, “yes, in this, and every other act of your villainy you have been detected, and shall be exposed and punished before the proper tribunal.  It is you, sir, and such scourges of the poor and industrious classes as you, who goad the unhappy, the destitute, and despairing people into crimes that are disgraceful to the country; it is you, and such as you, who force them, maddened by your cruelty and oppression, to fall back upon revenge, when they cannot find redress or justice in the laws of the land.  Unhappily the whole kingdom is studded too thickly with such men, and until property in this unfortunate country is placed upon an equal footing between landlord and tenant—­until the rights and privileges of him who farms and cultivates the soil, are as well protected and secured by law as are those of the other party, so long will there be bloodshed and crime.  The murderer is justly abhorred, apprehended, and punished as he ought in the sight of God and man to be:  but is there no law to reach unprincipled wretches like you, whose grinding rapacity, dishonesty, and inhumanity, furnish him with the motives and incentives to the crime he commits?  As for you, gentlemen, and honest men as you are,” he proceeded, addressing M’Loughlin and Harman. “you remain, of course, in your farms; you shall have reasonable and fair leases, and, what is more, your credit shall be re-established on as firm a footing as ever.  You shall be enabled to resume your business on an ample scale, and that as sure as I am master of two hundred thousand pounds.  And now, O’Drive, a word with you:—­I have fully discovered your treachery to both M’Clutchy and M’Slime; you were a willing agent in carrying out their hard and heartless excesses.  You were, in truth, a thorough bailiff, without conscience, feeling, or remorse.  In no instance have you ever been known to plead for, or take the part of a poor man; so far from that, I find that you have invited and solicited their confidence, only—­in case they did