“Ah, your honour,” said he, “the French are a great people!”
He then inquired whether we also had a Land League—he pronounced it lague—and was rather astonished when I told him that with us a tenant who could not pay always tried to leave, and that often, particularly just now, it was the landlords who compelled the tenants to remain in their farms. We agreed at once that landlords are a very bad lot, all the world over; he shook my hand with a vigour that nearly dislocated the arm, and we parted the best friends in the world.
I have forgotten one detail which is worth quoting. When I asked Mr. Patrick Hogan how he passed his time, he confided to me that he had taken some lands situate some distance from here. He held them at a very low price, and had managed to relet them at higher rents to three under-tenants. I asked him if he had not some trouble with his tenants. “Ah!” he answered; “I should like to see them refuse to pay me!” A reply that completely capsized all my notions of right and wrong, already much shaken by everything that I had heard and seen in this singular country!
[(April, 1887.) I have received from Ireland a request to rectify an error, which I hasten to do at once. I said that the Limerick butcher who took Colonel M——’s field, found his cows’ tails cut off. It appears that this misfortune happened to the cows of a neighbour under the same circumstances. The butcher hastened to withdraw his cows from the boycotted meadows before they suffered the same fate.
Neither was it Colonel M——’s would-be assassin who, when lying in a hospital in America, declared to his confessor that he had been paid by means of a subscription in which all the tenants on the estate had joined. The story is true, but it is applicable to another case.]
CHAPTER IV.
LIMERICK—ADMIRABLE SELF-DEVOTION OF THE IRISH PIGS—THE AGENTS—MALLOW—KILLARNEY—HOW ONE TRAVELS IN KERRY—MUCKROSS ABBEY—AN IRISH HUT—DERRYGARIFF—THE ORIGIN OF AN ESTATE—THE DRAMA OF GLENVEIGH—A DINNER IN KERRY.
Tuesday, July 6th.—At nine o’clock this morning, I quitted the hospitable mansion of Ballinacourty, in order to keep an appointment which I had made with one of the most well-known agents in the south of Ireland. It seems that the Irish railway companies share in the general distress, or at least are doing a very poor amount of business. This, however, is not the result of the extremely luxurious accommodation afforded, for which our own lines are reproached. The station at Lisnagry, where I took my ticket, simply consists of a miserable shed leaning against a very small house; so small that one is quite surprised to see in it a tall young man, who is very ragged, but who discharges the triple duties of station-master, gate-keeper, and porter. As station-master he sells me a ticket—“Limerick single;” as gate-keeper he closes the barriers, addressing some invectives to a dozen freckled, bare-legged girls, who were noisily discussing their small affairs on the line; and lastly, as porter, he seized my portmanteau and placed it on the seat of the compartment, responding to my tip by piously wishing that all the saints in Paradise might bear me company.
“Thank you, your honour, and may the saints be with you, your honour!”