inhabitants of Kiltubby being employed on
Mr. Massey's land, and paid by Mr. Massey
or his steward every Saturday night, their
eightpence or ninepence a day, they were
obliged to work for farmers who took the
same land, and who had no money to cross
themselves with. These were fine doings and
fine times for Captain Rock, to whom in fact,
too many began to look.

At this pass of circumstances came Squire
Massey's crash, and the seizure of his house
by officers of the law—a thing that never
would have been thought of as possible
in the war-time. It ended by the principal
creditors coming down and holding council
together, when Mike appeared as one of
them, and not the least important. He was
on the spot, knew the land and the people,
was a creditor himself to some amount,
was shrewd, bore a good character, understood
accounts; in short, Mike Doolan was,
by the desire of the creditors and with the
consent of Mr. Massey, installed as manager
and head-man of the property, for the benefit
of creditors: he undertaking to transmit two
hundred and fifty pounds a year of the receipts
to Bruges.

The news was most unwelcome in Kiltubby.
It made one of themselves landlord and
master for the time being, but this was
precisely what neither labourers nor tenants
liked. Poor Tim whistled as light an air
as his fancy could suggest, and wished his
old friend and rival good luck. But, he
thought to himself quietly, that now would
be the time for him to be off to the 'Mericas,
if such an escapade were feasible. Nelly
pleaded for home, sweet home—of which the
sweetness was all moral, and even that
questionable—and Tim asked her, if she would not
prefer Yankee Land to Botany.

The new manager of the Kiltubby property
was not long in giving warnings to several
tenants. These tenants met, along with others
equally menaced, and employed their secretary,
Captain Rock, to write no mild notice to Mike
Doolan, that they would make such an
example as would be tould for ten thousand
years to come iu*the Goolden Vale, if he
came the hard master over them. The
only symptom of answer vouchsafed was
the addition of a few stand of arms to
Mike's arsenal, already pretty well provided.
Challenges having been thus exchanged on
both sides, à la mode de Tipperary, were not
long in producing a combat. One night
Captain Rock's forces surrounded the dwelling of
Mike Doolan, .and commanded him, under
pain of the infliction of very barbarous
tortures, to surrender his arms. This was all
that was for the present required of him.
Compliance, however, on his part, he knew to
be the first of concessions, of which the
inevitable consequence would be his being
necessitated to leave the country. Mike
showed fight, and fired upon his besiegers
from embrasures which he had cunningly
prepared. The besiegers tried to force the door,
or to burn it clown by a heap of blazing
wood laid against it. But Mike succeeded
in wounding several of his antagonists, and
putting them to flight before they had made
any breach in his stronghold.

Although the party engaged in the attack
were, by the regular laws of Irish agricultural
outrages, men from other parishes, Mike
revenged the wrong upon the ill-affected near
him. And finally he sued Tim in arrear of
rent—which indeed was the normal state of
the county and himself. He seized Tim's cow,
and canted it, that is, had it sold by auction.
It was bought by friends, and conveyed to a
not distant bog, where Tim had some small
profit from his cow, through poor Nelly
trudging to and fro with her pail, over miles
of dry and dreary road.

Otters were as severely treated, so a cow
became a rarity in Kiltubby. When the cow
was taken away, the bit of land was taken
with it; one was of little use without the other.
The land was withdrawn, because there was
not the excuse of a 'cow to feed, nor the
means of a dung-heap to manure it. Wages
became the sole support of the labourer; and
the ninepence a day upon which he subsisted
was paid in any way that pleased Mike Doolan.

The only mode in which this shrewd
manager would allow the men of Kiltubby to
"have any call to the land," was in the way
of con-acre; that is, a bit of land given to
them in March for the potato season, and
taken from them in October, as soon as the
potato harvest was dug out. Those who paid
twenty, or at most thirty shillings an acre for
annual rent, would be asked and would
consent to pay five, six, eight, ten pounds, and
even higher still, per con-acre. Mike calculated
the number of barrels of potatoes—as
they admeasure them in Ireland; he
calculated the outlay also; and he exacted, as
rent, a sum which was a fraction under what
the potato produce would fetch in the market.
Mike, in fact, ground down the people of
Kiltubby till, they declared, there was not a bit
of nose left on their face.

Had there been even the semblance of fairness
in the management, the poor man who
secured an acre for potatoes, ought to have
been allowed two or three years more to take
the rest of the value out of his manure,
paying a moderate rent. But Mike had the
manure, and thence he grew; and yet he
charged moreover a tremendous rent. The
fleeced peasant in revenge pointed his gun at
Mike from behind a hedge, but hesitated, as
yet, to fire.

The highest price affixed by Mike, and by
others of his grinding class, per con-acre, was
that paid for hay land; that is, for meadow
and grass land to be broken up, and having an
accumulated fertility sufficient to produce a
crop of potatoes without manure. Those who
had lost their cattle, and were otherwise, and
every way, behindhand, had no resource but