ttle? They'd be
murdered else entirely."

"Of course," said Mr. Tener, "the police would endeavour to protect the
cattle."

Then, turning to me, he said, "That is a very reasonable question. These
scoundrels, when they are afraid to tackle the men put under their ban,
go about at night, and mutilate and torture and kill the poor beasts. I
remember a case," he went on, "in Roscommon, where several head of
cattle mysteriously disappeared. They could be found nowhere. No trace
of them could be got. But long weeks after they vanished, some lads in a
field several miles away saw numbers of crows hovering over a particular
point. They went there, and there at the bottom of an abandoned
coal-shaft lay the shattered remains of these lost cattle. The poor
beasts had been driven blindfold over the fields and down into this pit,
where, with broken limbs, and maimed, they all miserably died of
hunger."

"Yes," said one of the tenants, "and our cattle'd be driven into the
Shannon, and drownded, and washed away."

"You must understand," interposed Mr. Tener "that when cattle are thus
maliciously destroyed the owners can recover nothing unless the remains
of the poor beasts are found and identified within three days."

The disgust which I felt and expressed at these revelations seemed to
encourage the tenants. One of them said that before the evictions came
off certain of the National Leaguers visited him, and told him he must
resist the officers. "I consulted my sister," he said, "and she said,
'Don't you be such a fool as to be doing that; we'll all be ruined
entirely by those rascals and rogues of the League.' And I didn't
resist. But only the other day I went to a priest in the trouble we are
in, and what do you think he said to me? He said, 'Why didn't you do as
you were bid? then you would be helped,' and he would do nothing for us!
Would you think that right, sir, in your country?"

"I should think in my country," I replied, "that a priest who behaved in
that way ought to be unfrocked."

"Did you pay over all your rent into the hands of the trustees of the
League?" I asked of one of these tenants.

"I paid over money to them, sir," he replied.

"Yes," I said, "but did you pay over all the amount of the rent, or how
much of it?"

"Oh! I paid as much as I thought they would think I ought to pay!" he
responded, with that sly twinkle of the peasant's eye one sees so often
in rural France.

"Oh! I understand," I said,