omewhat extensive--and so far
entirely unprofitable--portion of the village in his care. His late
father had complained all his life of the depreciation of values; the
growing reluctance to pay rents; and the general dying-out of the worth
of an estate that had passed into the hands of a Kingsnorth many
generations before in the ordinary course of business, for notes that
had not been taken up, and mortgages that had been foreclosed.

It was the open boast of the old gentleman that he had never seen the
village, and it was one of his dying gratifications that he would never
have to.

He had all the racial antipathy of a certain type of Englishmen to
anything IRISH. The word itself was unpleasant to his ears. He never
heard it without a shudder, and his intimates, at his request,
refrained from using it in his presence. The word represented to him
all that was unsavoury, unpatriotic and unprincipled.

One phrase of his, in speaking of Ireland at a banquet, achieved the
dignity of being printed in all the great London daily papers and was
followed by a splenetic attack in the "Irish Nation." Both incidents
pleased the old gentleman beyond measure. It was an unfailing source of
gratification to him that he had coined the historical utterance. He
quoted it with a grim chuckle on the few occasions when some guest,
unfamiliar with his prejudice, would mention in his presence the hated
word "Ireland."

It appears that one particularly hard winter, when, for some
unnecessary and wholly unwarrantable reason, the potato crop had
failed, and the little Irish village was in a condition of desperate
distress, it was found impossible to collect more than a tithe of Mr.
Kingsnorth's just dues. No persuasion could make the obstinate tenants
pay their rents. Threats, law-proceedings, evictions--all were useless.
They simply would not pay. His agent finally admitted himself beaten.
Mr. Kingsnorth must wait for better times.

Furious at his diminished income and hating, with a bitter hatred, the
disloyal and cheating tenantry, he rose at a Guildhall banquet to reply
to the toast of "The Colonies."

He drew vivid pictures of the splendour of the British possessions: of
India--that golden and loyal Empire; Australia with its hidden mines of
wealth, whose soil had scarce been scratched, peopled by patriotic,
zealous and toiling millions, honestly paying their way through life by
the sweat of their God-and-Queen-fearing brows. What an