Mr McQueen was a good farmer, but at the time he lived in Ireland, farmers could not own their farms.
The land was all owned by rich landlords, who did not do any work themselves. These landlords very often lived away in England or France, and did not know much about how the poor people lived at home, or how hard they had to work to get the money for the rent of their farms.
Sometimes, when they did know, they didn’t care. What they wanted was all the money they could get, so they could live in fine houses and wear beautiful clothes, and go where they pleased, without doing any work.
When the landlords were away, they had agents to collect the rents for them.
The business of these agents was to get all the rent money they could, and they made life very hard for the farmers.
Sometimes when the farmers couldn’t pay all the rent, the agent would turn them out of their houses. This was called “evicting” them. The farm that Mr McQueen lived on, as well as the village and all the country roundabout, was owned by the Earl of Elsmore, who lived most of the year in great style in England. The agent who collected rents was Mr Conroy. Nobody liked Mr Conroy very much, but everybody was afraid of him, because he could do so much to injure them.
So one morning when Mr McQueen came back very early from his potato-field, he was not glad to see Mr Conroy’s horse standing near his door, and Mr Conroy himself, leaning on the farmyard fence, looking at the fowls.
“How are you, McQueen?” said Mr Conroy, when Mr McQueen came up.
“Well enough, Mr Conroy,” said Mr McQueen.