and their neighbors from starving. The more independent in
circumstances were obliged to mortgage their horses and carts for
provisions and fodder; and all had, as far as their means went, to
patronize the new store opened by the contractors, who retailed
provisions and groceries, to those who had any thing to lose, at a
profit of one hundred and a quarter per cent. on their original cost.
For three months this was the state of things on the contract of our
_honorable_ company. Works not yet commenced, men and horses half
starving, occasional murmurs among the most knowing of the hands--which
murmurs were, however, soon allayed by the representations of the bosses
and their countryman Mr. Lofin, who pledged _his honor_ as a "gintlemon
that the whault lied intirely with the directors, and the _faurmuns_,
who refused to settle for the right uv way." The mystery was soon
cleared up by the appearance on the ground of Messrs. Van Stingey,
Lofin, & Whinny, with fifteen constables, who laid an injunction on all
the shanties, and quietly, revolver in hand, drove off the three hundred
horses to the county town, to secure those contractors in their pay for
the debt into which they brought all those men whom they got to deal in
their store, or who had any property. This is the way thousands of men
were deceived, betrayed, and robbed of all they possessed in the wide
world. And this is the way in which Messrs. Van Stingey, Timens,
Kitchins, Whinny, & Lofin supplied themselves with horses, carts,
shanties, and all other necessaries for carrying on the work according
to agreement. The plan had so far succeeded; the only question now was,
how to deprive these poor men of all legal redress, and have them
exterminated from the neighborhood. This was not difficult to effect
with poor men who were half starved, and who had to look out for work
somewhere else for the support of their families. Those men who had the
means left had quitted this cursed ground already, and Mr. P. Lofin
struck on an expedient by which others, the more bold, were soon
compelled to follow them. He proceeded some eighty or a hundred miles
into the State of Massachusetts, where he represented to several hundred
men from the part of Ireland to which himself belonged, which was
Connaught, that several of their countrymen were driven off and ill
treated by Munster men and _far-downs_, and that now they had not only a
chance of defending the _honor_ of the _province_, bu