He then rose, and touching the bell, said to the servant who answered it: 

“Send in the man named Darby Skinadre.”

If that miserable wretch was thin and shrivelled-looking when first introduced to our readers, he appeared at the present period little else than the shadow of what he had been.  He not only lost heavily the usurious credit he had given, in consequence of the wide-spread poverty and crying distress of the wretched people, who were mostly insolvent, but he suffered severely by the outrages which had taken place, and doubly so in consequence of the anxiety which so many felt to wreak their vengeance on him, under that guise, for his heartlessness and blood-sucking extortions upon them.

“Your name,” proceeded the agent, “is Darby Skinadre?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you have given this gentleman the sum of a hundred pounds, as a bribe, for promising you a lease of Cornelius Dalton’s farm?”

“I gave him a hundred pounds, but not at all as a bribe, sir; I’m an honest man, I trust—­an’ the Lord forbid I’d have anything to do wid a bribe; an’ if you an’ he knew—­if you only knew, both o’ you—­the hard strivin,’ an’ scrapin,’ an’ sweepin’ I had to get it together—­”

“That will do, sir; be silent.  You received this money, Mr. Henderson?”

“Tut, Travers, my good friend; this is playing too high a card about such a matter.  Don’t you know, devilish well, that these things are common, aye, and among gentlemen and honest men too, as you say?”

“Well, that is a discussion upon which I shall not enter.  Now, as you say, to business.”

“Well, then,” continued Henderson, smiling, “if you have no objection, I am willing that you should take Skinadre’s affair and mine as a precedent between you and me.  Let us not be fools, Mr. Travers; it is every one for himself in this world.”

“What is it you expect, in the first place?” asked the agent.

“Why, new leases,” replied the other, “upon reasonable terms, of course.”

“Well, then,” said Travers, “I beg to inform you that you shall not have them, with only one exception.  You shall have a lease of sixty-nine acres attached to the Grange, being the quantity of land you actually farm.”

“Pray, why not of all the property?” asked Dick.

“My good friend,” replied the agent, nearly in his own words to the Pedlar; “the fact is, that we are about to introduce a new system altogether upon our property.  We are determined to manage it upon a perfectly new principle.  It has been too much sublet under us, and we have resolved, Mr. Henderson, to rectify this evil.  That is my answer.  With the exception of the Grange farm, you get no leases.  We shall turn over a new leaf, and see that a better order of things be established upon the property.  As for you, Skinadre, settle this matter of your hundred pounds with Mr. Henderson as best you may.  That was a private transaction between yourselves; between yourselves, then, does the settlement of it lie.”