In this state stood the incidents of our narrative, suspended for some time by the illness of the coroner, when Mr. Travers, himself a magistrate, came to the head inn of the county town in which he always put up, and where he held his office.  He had for several days previously gone over the greater portion of the estate, and inspected the actual condition of the tenantry on it.  It is unnecessary to say that he was grieved at the painful consequences of the middleman system, and of sub-letting in general.  Wherever he went, he found the soil in many places covered with hordes of pauper occupants, one holding under another in a series that diminished from bad to worse in everything but numbers, until he arrived at a state of destitution that was absolutely! disgraceful to humanity.  And what rendered this state of things doubly painful and anomalous was the fact, that while these starving wretches lived upon his employer’s property, they had no claim on him as a landlord, nor could he recognize them as tenants.  It is true that these miserable creatures, located upon small patches of land, were obliged to pay their rents to the little tyrant who was over them, and he again, probably to a still more important little tyrant, and so on; but whenever it happened that the direct tenant, or any one of the series, neglected to pay his or their rent, of course the landlord had no other remedy than to levy it from off the soil, thus rendering it by no means an unfrequent case that the small occupiers who owed nothing to him or those above them were forced to see their property applied to the payment of the head rent, in consequence of the inability, neglect, or dishonesty of the middleman, or some other subordinate individual from whom, they held.  This was a state of things which Mr. Travers wished to abolish, but to do so, without inflicting injury, however unintentional, or occasioning harshness to the people, was a matter not merely difficult but impossible.  As we are not, however, writing a treatise upon the management of property, we shall confine ourselves simply to the circumstances only of such of the tenants as have enacted a part in our narrative.

About a week had now elapsed since the abusive contest between Jemmy Branigan and the pedlar; the coroner was beginning to recover, and Charley Hanlon’s aunt had disappeared altogether from the neighborhood.  Previous to her departure, however, she, her nephew, and the pedlar, had several close, and apparently interesting conferences, into which their parish priest, the Rev. Anthony Devlin, was ultimately admitted.  It was clear, indeed, that whatever secret the pedlar communicated, had inspired both Hanlon and his aunt with fresh energy in their attempts to discover the murderer of their relative; and there could be little doubt that the woman’s disappearance from the scene of its perpetration was in some way connected with the steps they were taking to bring everything connected with it to light.