o a clump of trees found
ourselves at last in an open courtyard, where men appeared and took
charge of the car, the horse, and my luggage. We were in a quadrangle of
the out-buildings attached to the old residence of the Clanricardes,
which had escaped the fire of 1826. The late Marquis for a long time
hesitated whether to reconstruct the castle on the old site (the walls
are still standing), or to build an entirely new house on another site.
He finally chose the latter alternative, chiefly, I am told, under the
advice of his oldest son, the late Lord Dunkellin, one of the most
charming and deservedly popular men of his time. He was a great friend
and admirer of Father Burke, whom he used to claim as a Galway cousin,
and with whom I met him in Rome not long before his death in the summer
of 1867. His brother, the present Marquis, I have never met, but Mr.
Tener, his present agent here, who passed some time in America several
years ago, learning from him that I wished to see this place, very
courteously wrote to me asking me to make his house my headquarters. I
found my way through queer passages to a cheery little hall where my
host met me, and taking me into a pleasant little parlour, enlivened by
flowers, and a merrily blazing fire, presented me to Mrs. Tener.

Mr. Tener is an Ulster man from the County Cavan. He went with his wife
on their bridal trip to America, and what he there saw of the peremptory
fashion in which the authorities deal with conspiracies to resist the
law seems not unnaturally to have made him a little impatient of the
dilatory, not to say dawdling, processes of the law in his own country.
He gave me a very interesting account after dinner this evening of the
situation in which he found affairs on this property, an account very
different from those which I have seen in print. He is himself the owner
of a small landed property in Cavan, and he has had a good deal of
experience as an agent for other properties. "I have a very simple
rule," he said to me, "in dealing with Irish tenants, and that is
neither to do an injustice nor to submit to one." It was only, he said,
after convincing himself that the Clanricarde tenants had no legitimate
ground of complaint against the management of the estate, not removable
upon a fair and candid discussion of all the issues involved between
them and himself, that he consented to take charge of the property. That
to do this was to run a certain personal risk, in th