Those purchasers who were English conceived when they bought properties that they would get as much from them as the solvent tenants were willing to pay.  The legislation of Mr. Gladstone in coalition with the blunderbuss soon put an end to the pleasing delusion.  It was one more of the English mistakes about Ireland, where, when the tenant is content to pay, the British Government and the Land League both combine to prevent him from offering a reasonable rent to a landlord.

As a matter of fact, even the most seditionary organs confessed that the tenants gained little and lost much by the change from the old type of landlord to the new, for the latter, being practical men, had no sympathy for the man who was permanently behindhand with his rent.  And no one can say that this habitual arrear was a healthy stimulus to the moral wellbeing of the tenant himself, though he felt aggrieved at its being checked.

There is not the least need to sketch how I gradually became one of the largest land agents in Ireland.  It has been published in other books, and would only prove wearisome if set out in detail in this volume.  So I will merely observe that only two years after the big Fenian rising, as it was called—­which I should describe as being composed of a rabble of less importance than the ragamuffins led by Wat Tyler—­so little was I impressed by its magnitude that I went to live at Edenburn.  There I laid out a lot of money in rebuilding the house, spending over L2000 in additions.  This was most idiotic of me, because I had not counted on the infernal devices of Mr. Gladstone to render Ireland uninhabitable for peaceful and law-abiding folk.

When I first settled down there, labourers were working at eightpence or tenpence a day.  Now the lowest rate is two shillings.  The labourer rectified this rate by emigration, and if the farmers, who could more advantageously have emigrated, had done so, the cry for compulsory reduction would never have arisen.

Thus far I have dealt with facts and myself as concerned in them, but I propose now to relate a few stories, a thing more congenial to my temperament than any other form of conversational exercise.  Whether it will equally commend itself to the reader is a matter on which I, as an aged novice in literature, though hopeful, am of course uncertain.

Indeed I am in exactly the predicament of a farmer’s wife who was asked by the Dowager Lady Godfrey, after a month of marriage, how she liked her husband.

‘I had plenty of recommendation with him,’ was the reply, ’but I have not had enough trial of him yet to say for sure.’

There is a story about a honeymoon couple at Killarney which is worth telling.

The bridegroom had a valet, a good, faithful fellow, long in his service, but talkative, a thing his master loathed.  He said to him:—­

’John, I’ve often told you to hold your tongue about my affairs.  This time I emphatically mean it.  If you tell the people in the hotel that I am on my honeymoon, I’ll sack you on the spot.’