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I went out with them and followed their naughty courses, and have stricken down many a fat Buck in my time. Ours was the most jovial but the most perilous of lives. The Keepers were always on our track; and sometimes the Sheriff would call out the Posse Comitatis, and he and half the beef-fed tenant-farmers of the country-side would come horsing and hoofing it about the glades to catch us.
To show how completely the members of what ought to be a middle-class, I mean the large tenant-farmers, are identified with the peasant class, I may add that many of them, working with a capital of many thousands of pounds, are subscribers to the Land League, and that many are not paying their rent.
In the houses of the majority of tenant-farmers the mistress herself has to be a good deal in the kitchen, and therefore comes into close personal contact with the servants, and feels these things acutely. Except in the case of gentleman-farmers it may, perhaps, be said that almost all the wives of farmers have had experience of this kind.
The general raised the salary of the new field-keeper to three hundred francs; and built a town-hall, in which he gave him a residence. Then he married him to a daughter of one of his tenant-farmers, who had lately died, leaving her an orphan with three acres of vineyard. Groison attached himself to the general as a dog to his master. This legitimate fidelity was admitted by the whole community.
But the fact is that the landlord's representative his steward has been forced to this step by the action and opinion of the tenant-farmers. The argument is very cogent and clear. They say, 'We pay a rent which is almost as much as the land will bear; we suffer by foreign competition, bad seasons and so on, the market is falling, and we are compelled to reduce our labour expenditure.
The tenant-farmers, in some cases, complain of their rents, and would complain more loudly but for fear of being classed with the Land League, for they in the north are intensely loyal. As for the mere laborer, no one seems to consider him or think of him at all.
He proposes that the repayment should be spread over a considerable number of years I do not know the exact number, and it is not of importance for my argument. These tenant-farmers are very numerous perhaps too numerous, it may be, for the good of the country but there they are, and we must deal with them as we find them.
"Do you know of any place in the ownership of a gentleman who would be likely to lend his house to a friend?" "I can't say I do, sir. They're tenant-farmers about here mostly, and rather a roughish lot, as you may say.
But so rapid a rise in the value of his land quite dazzled the proprietor, and the labourer for he was really nothing better, though fortunate enough to have a little money entered on his farm. When this was known, it was triumphantly remarked that if a man could actually pay double the former rent, what an enormous profit the tenant-farmers must have been making!
As we drew near the eastern boundary of Donegal, hedges and civilised agriculture reappeared. With these we came upon mud cottages, such as I had not seen in Donegal, being the huts provided for their labourers by the tenant-farmers, whose comfortable stone-houses and out-buildings stood well back under the long ranges of the hills.
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