"Where are the hapless people, doomed by John Adair's decree?
Some linger in the drear poor-house—some are beyond the sea;
One died behind the cold ditch—back beneath the open sky,
And every star in heaven was a witness from on high.
None dared to ope a friendly door, or lift a neighbor's latch,
Or shelter by a warm hearthstone beneath the homely thatch.
"Beside the lake in sweet Glenveigh, his tall white castle stands,
With battlement and tower high, fresh from the mason's hands;
It's built of ruined hearth stones, its cement is bitter tears,
It's a monument of infamy to all the future years,
He is written childless, for of his blood no heir
Shall inherit land or lordship from cruel John Adair.
"His cognizance the bloody hand has a wild meaning now,
It is pointing up for vengeance to Cain-like mark his brow,
It speaks of frantic hands that clasped the side posts of the door;
Pale lips that kissed the threshold they would cross, oh, never more.
The scattered stones of many homes, the desolated farms,
Shall mark with deeper red the hand upon his coat of arms.
The silver birches of Glenveigh when stirred by summer air
Shall whisper of the curse that hangs o'er cruel John Adair."
X.
WHY THE RENT IS RAISED—THE HISTORY OF AN EVICTION FROM ONE OF THE EVICTED—A DONEGAL CONGREGATION—A CLIMB TO THE TOP OF DOONHILL—DOON HOLY WELL—MAKING THE BEST OF A STRANGER.
In the silence of the night when sleep would not come, and when my imagination rehearsed over and over again sights I had seen and tales I had heard, I made an almost cast-iron resolution to escape to the estate of Stewart of Ards and have one letter filled up with the good deeds of a landlord. Alas for me! another storm, a rain storm, and a touch of neuralgia conspired to keep me "ben the house" in the little room upon the mountain side. One can weather snow or hail easier than a mountain rain storm. The rain is laden with half-melted snow, and the wind that drives it is terribly in earnest.
It is one queer feature of this mountain scenery, the entire absence of trees. The hills look as if the face of the country had been shaved. Up the hill sides the little fields are divided off by high, broad stone fences, the result of gathering the stones out of the fields. The bog land to be reclaimed requires drains three feet deep every six feet of land.
To trench up a little field into ridges six feet apart, to gather stones out of a little field sufficient to surround it with a four feet high stone fence, to grub out and burn whins, to make all the improvements with your own labor, and then to have your landlord come along with his valuator and say, "Your farm is worth double what you pay for it; I can get thirty shillings an acre for it," and to raise the rent to its full value, which you must pay or go out. This sort of thing is repeated, and repeated, in every variation of circumstances and of hardship, and the people submit and are, as a whole, quiet and law-abiding.
I was called out of my little den to see a woman, one of the evicted tenants of Mr. Adair. She was on her way to Letterkenny to see her son, who is in the asylum since the eviction. It was hard enough to wander through the ruins and hear of the eviction scenes from others, but to sit by the turf fire and listen to one who had suffered and was suffering from this dreadful act, to see the recollection of it expressed in look and tone was different. This woman—husband dead, son in the asylum—was a decent-looking body in cloak and cap, with a bleached face and quiet voice.
"We were all under sentence of eviction, but it was told to us that it was for squaring the farms. Then we were warned to pay in the half- year's rent. It was not due till May, and we had never been asked to pay the rent ahead of us before. But the landlord was a new one, and if he made a rule, why, we must obey him; so we scraped up and sold this and that and paid it. If we had known what was coming we might have kept it, and had a penny to turn to when we were out under the sky. It was to get the rent before he turned us out that he made that plan. We were put out in the beginning of April; our rent was paid up to May. Oh, I wish, I wish that he had driven us into the lake the day he put us out. A few minutes would have ended our trouble, but now when will it end! I have been through the country, my lady, and my boy in the asylum ever since."