Mike saw the trap he had fallen into. Before striking a spade he should have gone to My Lord’s agent, and got permission. But he was in for it, for he knew that My Lord had a legal excuse to rob him of his years of labor.
But the next morning he went to the chapel, and interviewed the priest. The priest asked:—
“If you get that earth back by Monday morning, will you hold the land?”
“Unless the ould—that is—My Lord doesn’t kape his worrud.”
“We’ll try whether he does!” said the father.
And so the sermon that morning was a very short one, and mostly devoted to Mike’s case. At its conclusion the father asked every man in the parish to come at once with his spade and put that earth back. They came—thousands of them—and they wrought with a will, and long before Monday morning the drain was filled up as nicely as possible; and when My Lord came riding by again to see the drain, and give orders for the eviction of Mike, he found that his cruel alternative had been fulfilled, as if by fairies.
An Irishman in Corduroy knee-breeches, with a spade in his hand and a short clay pipe in his mouth, would not make a very happy stage fairy, but he was a very serviceable fairy to Mike.
Had Mike not been so assisted he would have been evicted, and there would have been no appeal from it. He couldn’t employ counsel to fight his battle, for he had nothing with which to pay counsel, and the Justice would be a landlord anyhow, who had other Mikes to evict, and so Mike would have never gone into court at all, but would have accepted his fate in silence.
A cheerful state of affairs, surely.
And speaking of the possibility of paying rent, I remember a young man on the Galtees, insufficiently clad (that was nothing new), working for dear life in a soaking rain.