f I can't have it, I'll sell out and go
away; but I'll be--if I don't fight before I do that same!'"

"What could you reply to that?" I asked.

"Oh," I said, "'that's square and straightforward. Only just let me know
the point at which you mean to fight, and then we'll see if we can agree
about something.'"

"The truth is," said Mr. Seigne, "that there is a pressure upward now
from below. The labourers don't want to live any longer as the farmers
have always made them live; and so the farmers, having to consider the
growing demands of the labourers, and meaning to live better themselves,
push up against the landlord, and insist that the means of the
improvement shall come out of him."

He then told me an instructive story of his calling upon a
tenant-farmer, at whose place he found the labourers sitting about their
meal of pork and green vegetables. The farmer asked him into another
room, where he saw the farmer's family making their meal of stirabout
and milk and potatoes.

"I asked you in here," said the farmer, "because we keep in here to
ourselves. I don't want those fellows to see that we can't afford to
give ourselves what we have to give them,"--this with strong language
indicating that he must himself be given a way to advance equally with
the progressive labourer, or he would know the reason why!

This afternoon Mr. Seigne drove me over through a beautiful country to
Woodstock, near Inistiogue, the seat of the late Colonel Tighe, the head
of the family of which the authoress of "Psyche" was an ornament.

It is the finest place in this part of Ireland, and one of the finest I
have seen in the three kingdoms, a much more picturesque and more nobly
planted place indeed than its namesake in England. The mansion has no
architectural pretensions, being simply a very large and, I should
think, extremely comfortable house of the beginning of this century. The
library is very rich, and there are some good pictures, as well as
certain statues in the vestibule, which would have no interest for the
Weissnichtwo professor of _Sartor Resartus_, but are regarded with some
awe by the good people of Inistiogue.

The park would do no discredit to a palace, and if the vague project of
establishing a royal residence in Ireland for one of the British Princes
should ever take shape, it would not be easy, I should say, to find a
demesne more befitting the home of a prince than this of the Tighes. At
present it serves the Sta