The matrimonial arrangements of Irish farmers in Kerry may sound queer to an English reader, but are the outcome of an innate, though unwritten, law that the whole family have a vested interest in the affair.

For example, when the family is growing up, the farm is handed over to the eldest son, who gives the parents a small allowance during their lives, while the fortune that he gets with his wife goes, not to himself, but to provide for his younger brothers and sisters.

Hence, if the eldest son were to marry the Venus de Medici with ten pounds less dowry than he could get with the ugliest wall-eyed female in the neighbourhood, he would be considered as an enemy to all his family.

A tenant of a neighbour of mine actually got married to a woman without a penny, a thing unparalleled in my experience in Kerry, and his sister presently came to my wife for some assistance.

My wife asked her:—­

‘Why does not your brother support you?’

And she was answered:—­

’How could he support any one after bringing an empty woman to the house?’

There was a tenant of mine, paying about twenty-five pounds a year rent, who died, and his son came to me to have his name inscribed in the rent account.

I asked him what will his father had made.

He replied that he had left him the farm and its stock.

‘What’s to become of your brother and sister?’ says I.

‘They are to get whatever I draw,’ says he.

‘That means whatever you get with your wife?’

‘That is so.’

’Well, suppose you marry a girl worth only twenty pounds, what would happen then?’

‘That would not do at all,’ very gravely.

‘Is there no limit put on the worth of your wife?’

‘Oh,’ says he, ‘I was valued at one hundred and sixty pounds.’

I found out afterwards he had one hundred and seventy with his wife.

A tenant on the Callinafercy estate got married, and the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law did not agree.  So the elder came to complain to the landlord of the girl’s conduct, and after copiously describing various delinquencies with the assistance of many invocations of the saints, she wound up with:—­

’And the worst of all, Mr. Marshall, is that she gives herself all the airs of a three hundred pound girl and she had but a hundred and fifty.’

Filial obedience in the matter of marriage is as uniform in these classes in Kerry as it is conspicuous by its absence in old English novels and comedies.  The sons never kick at the unions, the daughters are never hauled weeping to the altar, while an elopement or a refusal to fulfil a matrimonial engagement would arouse the indignation of the whole country side.