r.
'It's a bit of paper from the tenants, sir,' he said. A queer bit of
paper it was to look at--ruled paper, with a composition written upon it
which might have been the work of a village schoolmaster. It was neither
signed nor addressed! The pith of it was in these words,--'in
consequence of the manner in which we have been harassed, our cattle
driven throughout the country, and our crops not sown, we shall be
unable to pay the half-year's rent due in March, in addition to the
reduction already claimed!' I own I rather lost my temper at this!
Remember I had already plainly refused to give 'the reduction already
claimed,' and had told them not once, but twenty times, that I would
never surrender to the 'Plan of Campaign'! I am afraid my language was
Pagan rather than Parliamentary--but I told them plainly, at least, that
if they did not break from the Plan of Campaign, and pay their debts,
they might be sure I would turn the whole of them out! I gave them back
their precious bit of paper and sent them packing.

"One of them, I have told you, was a mountain man, Stephen Maher. He is
commonly known among the people as 'the old fox of the mountain,' and he
is very proud of it!

"This old Stephen Maher," said Mr. Brooke, "is renowned in connection
with a trial for murder, at which he was summoned as a witness. When he
was cross-examined by Mr. Molloy, Q.C., he fenced and dodged about with
that distinguished counsellor for a long time, until getting vexed by
the lawyer's persistency, he exclaimed, 'Now thin, Mr. Molloy, I'd have
ye to know that I had a cliverer man nor iver you was, Mr. Molloy, at
me, and I had to shtan' up to him for three hours before the Crowner,
an' he was onable to git the throoth out of me, so he was! so he was!'"

Neither did Dr. Dillon mention the fact that one of the demands made of
Captain Hamilton, Mr. Brooke's agent, in December 1886, was that a
Protestant tenant named Webster should be evicted by Mr. Brooke from a
farm for which he had paid his rent, to make room for the return thither
of a Roman Catholic tenant named Lenahan, previously evicted for
non-payment of his rent.

When Mr. Brooke's grandfather bought the Coolgreany property in 1864, he
adopted a system of betterments, which has been ever since kept up on
the estate. Nearly every tenant's house on the property has been slated,
and otherwise repaired by the landlord, nor has one penny ever been
added on that account to the rents.