mploying girls to milk the cows and make
the butter, the farmer appears to me to do nothing whatever except go
to market and drink himself into a disaffected, discontented
condition. He is rarely visible before ten or eleven o'clock in the
morning, except on market days, and he appears to smoke and dawdle
most of his time away. Just now he broods over his wrongs, and
declares he "will have his own again," whatever that may signify. He
says he is enormously over-rented. Perhaps he is; but I cannot forget
that it is not many years since he and his neighbours in the adjacent
county of Tipperary boasted that they had brought about an equitable
adjustment of values by an ingenious process invented by
themselves--that of "shooting down the rents." Have they gone up since
under maleficent Saxon coercion? Verily, I do not know; for the faith
I put in estimates and valuations, not excepting "The Book of
Griffith," is but small.

Information in Ireland depends entirely on the person who
"infawrrrums" one, and is rarely complete. Almost everybody seems to
think that an inquirer has some object to serve, and they either tell
him what they think will amuse him or advance their own interest if it
be repeated; but there are notable exceptions to this as to all other
Irish rules.

Chatting easily, we stroll back through Kilfinane, bewailing the
sternness of military rule, which keeps officers and men together, and
will not permit of the principal coming warriors being quartered at
Spa-hill. On one point we are most anxious, and that is, that the
troops shall be in Kilfinane by Christmas-day, to the end that the
gaiety proper to the British Army should enliven the "Boycotted"
establishment at dinner time; while the imposing presence of Thomas
Atkins should overawe the village mutineers, and bring grist to the
proprietor of the Couleur de Rose Hotel. As evening gathers in we sit
down drowsily to listen to the loud ticking of the clock and drink a
glass of sherry to the health of "all poor and distressed Boycottees"
within her Majesty's "sometime kingdom of Ireland." Soothed by sherry,
incipient sleep, and the subtle influence of the season, the little
garrison of Spa-hill gradually waxes benevolent, until one of its
number actually suggests that a fat goose should be sent to the
proximate cause of all its woes, Father Sheehy. Even as a big loaf of
bread was once thrown into an enemy's camp, at one moment this
spirited proposition is n