sible for their condition, they were the most
ignorant and superstitious people in the British Islands. Landlords
were not yet awakened to a sense that their tenants should at least be
taught to read; and Connemara was esteemed, I am told, as a kind of
penal settlement for priests who had not proved shining lights in more
civilised communities. The latter reproach can no longer be brought,
for the zeal and activity of the local clergy are conspicuous; and
where the children are within any reasonable distance of a school they
come readily to it, and prove bright and apt scholars. But when the
"run of the mountain" was seized upon by many proprietors, the people
were mentally, if not bodily, in a swinish condition. The idea of any
right which a landlord was bound to respect had not dawned upon them,
and, if it had, prompt vengeance would have descended on the village
Hampden in the shape of a notice to quit, and he whose conception of
the world was limited to his native mountains would have been turned
out upon them with his wife and children to die.

I hear on very good authority that the purchaser of part of one of the
old estates has acquired an unpleasant notoriety in his management of
the land. I am compelled to believe that in the old period the
peasants enjoyed their little holdings at a very low rent. Moreover
these holdings were not all "measured on 'um," as one of my informants
phrased it, but were often composed of two or more patches, bits of
productive land, taken here and there on the rough mountain. Doubtless
this arrangement had its inconveniences, but the people were
accustomed to it, and also set great store by the run of the mountain,
which they had, it seems, enjoyed without let or hindrance from time
immemorial. The first act of the new management was to "sthripe the
land on 'um," that is to mark it out into five-pound holdings, each in
one "sthripe" or block. This arrangement, which to the ordinary mind
hardly appears unreasonable, was considered oppressive by the tenants,
who submitted, however, as was then the manner of their kind. They had
still the mountain, and could graze their cow or two, or their
half-dozen sheep upon it, and they naturally regarded this privilege
as the most valuable part of their holding, inasmuch as it paid their
rent, clothed them, and supplied them with milk to drink with their
potatoes. In these days of alimentary science it is needless to remind
readers that, humble as