“Was it a landlord who has been the occasion of so much enjoyment to you, Murty?” said Father O’Shane, drawing him out.

“Yes, sir.  It vexes me to think of it, much more to speak of it,” said the simple youth, with a tear full created in his eye.  “We, and our forefathers before us, had the farm of Lapardawn for more than three hundred years.  A new landlord coming in possession of the estate, we got notice to quit, in the middle of winter.  My father refused to yield the hearth of his forefathers without a struggle, and locked himself and family up.  My mother was just after her confinement, and becoming short of provisions and even of water, she begged of the police who kept guard to hand her in a drink.  They refused.  She then begged, for God’s sake, to have a messenger go for the priest.  For two days, the police refused to let any body out of the house, unless we surrendered.  My father, who had cut a hole in the roof of the house to catch at rain water for my dying mother, made his escape through it.  A neighbor, who handed me a drink of water through a broken pane in a window, had his hand cut off by a stroke from the police sergeant’s sabre.  My poor mother died before the priest arrived.  My oldest brother, seeing his mother dead, and that we had nothing now to guard, surrendered.  We were all lodged in jail that night, and all our means were sold at auction.  It was lucky for us we were put into jail; for, one week from that day, the landlord that was the cause of all our misery and of my mother’s death was shot dead on the road from our farm to the town of Ennis.  If we were out of jail, we would all have been accused of the cruel landlord’s murder, and hanged; but we were, after one year in prison for the crime of defending our homestead, liberated, and came out in a body to America.  And now I am glad of it, for two signs of tyranny I find wanting here—­landlords and game laws.  The absence of one allows me to trace the steps of the wild quadruped; and of the other, to trace my title to the soil which I shall possess, down to the middle of the earth and up to the sky, unfrowned on, or unawed by the landlord’s tyranny or the ‘peeler’s’ cruelty.  This is partly why I like to see these mountains of snow,” said he, “for I think that neither landlords nor ‘peelers’ could exist here.  They would become buried under these snow banks, for it is by night that they are generally patrolling the highways, and plotting against the peace of innocent families; and such a storm as the late one could not but be fatal to the villains.”

These and the like sentiments are those which generally pervade the bosom of the Irish emigrant after landing on this enfranchised land.  Wonder not, then, you natives of this God-provided country, that the foreigner is likely to become more republican than yourselves, and that his is a keener sense of enjoyment than yours, from the evils of his antecedent life.  Do not, therefore, become jealous of his purer and