He
had in the spring of that year, been engaged as a common laborer by
Dick o' the Grange, in which capacity he soon attracted his employer's
notice, by his extraordinary skill in almost everything pertaining to
that worthy gentleman's establishment. It is true he was a stranger in
the country, of whom nobody knew anything--for there appeared to be some
mystery about him; but as Dick cared little of either his place of birth
or pedigree, it was sufficient for him to find that Hanlon was a
very useful, not to say valuable young man, about his house, that
he understood everything, and had an eye and hand equally quick and
experienced. The consequence was, that he soon became a favorite with
the father, and a kind of _sine qua non_ with the son, into whose rustic
gallantries he entered, with a spirit that satisfied the latter of his
capacity to serve him in that respect as well as others. Hanlon,
in truth, was just the person for such a master, and for such an
establishment as he kept. Dick o' the Grange was not a man who, either
by birth, education, or position in society, could entertain any
pretensions to rank with the gentry of the surrounding country. It is
true he was a magistrate, but then he was a middleman, and as such found
himself an interested agent in the operation of one of the worst and
most cruel systems that ever cursed either the country or the people.
We of course mean that which suffered a third party to stand between
the head landlord, and those who in general occupied the soil. Of this
system, it may be with truth said, that the iniquity lay rather in the
principal on which it rested, than in the individual who administered
it; because it was next to an impossibility that a man anxious to
aggrandize his family--as almost every man is--could, in the exercise of
the habits which enable him to do so, avoid such a pressure upon those
who were under him as amounted to great hardships and injustice. The
system held out so many temptations to iniquity in the management of
land, and in the remuneration of labor, that it required an amount of
personal virtue and self-denial to resist them, that were scarcely to
be expected from any one, so difficult was it to overlook or neglect the
opportunities for oppression and fraud which it thus offered.

Old Dick, although bearing the character of being a violent and
outrageous man, was, however, one of those persons of whom there will
be always somebody found to speak