nd punished
depredations of this sort, and was informed that trees planted by
tenants, if registered by them within a certain time, are the property
of the tenants. This would astonish our landlords in America, where the
tenant who sticks so much as a sunflower into his garden-patch makes a
present of it to his landlord.[14]

I asked if the place made a long defence. Mr. Tener and the constable
both laughed, and the former told me that when the storming party
arrived shortly after daybreak, they found the house garrisoned only by
some small boys, who had been left there to keep watch. The men were
fast asleep at some other place. The small boys ran away as fast as
possible to give the alarm, but the police went in, and in a jiffey
pulled to pieces the elaborate defences prepared to repel them. Father
Coen, the constable said, got to Kenny's house an hour after it was all
over, with a mob of people howling and groaning. But the work had been
done, and other work also at the Castle of Cloondadauv, to which we next
drove.

This place takes its truly awe-inspiring name from a ruined Norman tower
standing on a picturesque promontory of no great height, which juts out
into the lovely lake here made by the Shannon. At no great expense this
tower might be so restored as to make an ideal fishing-box. It now
simply adorns the holding formerly occupied by Mr. John Stanislaus
Burke, a former tenant of Lord Clanricarde. The story of its capture on
the 17th of September is worth telling.

Some days before the evictions were to come off, a meeting was held at
Woodford or Loughrea, at which one of the speakers, the patriotic Dr.
Tully, rather incautiously and exultingly told his hearers that the
defence in 1886 of the tenant's house known as "Fort Saunders" had been
a grand and gallant affair indeed, but that next time "the exterminators
would have to storm a castle"!

This put Mr. Tener at once on the alert, and as Mr. Burke of Cloondadauv
was set down for eviction, it didn't require much cogitation to fix upon
the fortress destined to be "stormed." So he set about the campaign. The
County Inspector of the constabulary, who had made a secret
reconnaissance, reported that he found the place too strong to be taken
if defended, except "by artillery." So it was determined to take it by
surprise.

When the previous evictions were made, the agent and the public forces
had marched from Portumna by the highway to Woodford, so that, of