proverbial grain of seasoning. I find him as
a rule very quiet until I have administered to him a dose of "the wine
of the country," and then he mourns over the desolation of the land
and the ravages of the so-called "crowbar brigade" as if they were
things of yesterday. Whether the local Press reflects the opinion of
the peasants of Mayo, or the peasants only echo the opinion of the
Press as reproduced to them by native orators, I am at present hardly
prepared to decide. One thing, however, is certain. Not only that
professional "deludher," the car-driver, but tradesmen, farmers, and
all the less wealthy part of the community still speak sorely of the
evictions of thirty and forty years ago, and point out the graveyards
which alone mark the sites of thickly populated hamlets abolished by
the crowbar. All over this part of the country people complain
bitterly of loneliness. According to their view, their friends have
been swept away and the country reduced to a desert in order that it
might be let in blocks of several square miles each to Englishmen and
Scotchmen, who employ the land for grazing purposes only, and perhaps
a score or two of people where once a thousand lived--after a fashion.
It is of no avail to point out to them that the wretchedly small
holdings common enough even now in Connaught cannot be made to support
the farmer, or rather labourer, and his family decently, even in the
best of years, and that any failure of crop must signify ruin and
starvation. Any observation of this kind is ill received by the
people, who cling to their inhospitable mountains as a woman clings to
a deformed or idiot child. And in this astonishing perversion of
patriotism they are supported in unreasoning fashion by their
pastors, who seem to imagine that because a person is born on any
particular spot he must remain there and insist on its maintaining him
and his.

Now, it is not inconceivable that a landlord should take a very
different view of the situation. Whether his estate is encumbered or
not, he expects to get something out of it for himself. It was
therefore not unnatural that advantage should have been taken of the
famine and the Encumbered Estates Act to get the land into such
condition that it would return some ascertainable sum. The best way of
effecting this was thought to be the removal of the inhabitants who
paid rent or not as it suited them, and in place of a few hundred of
these to secure one responsible te