y profess to regard as a flagrant breach of
faith, and they at once decided to pay no rent at all. The position
became a deadlock, and such it still remains. They affect to believe
that the last agent, Mr. Willis, resigned his post out of sheer
sympathy, and not because he feared sudden translation to a brighter
sphere. They complain that the Colonel's stables are too handsome, and
that they themselves live in cabins less luxurious than the lodgings
of the landlord's horses. There is no epithet too strong to express
their indignation against the devoted Colonel, who was described by
one imaginative peasant, who had worked himself up to a sort of
descriptive convulsion, as a "Rawhacious Vagabone," a fine instance of
extemporaneous word-coining of the ideo-phonetic school, which will
doubtless be greedily accepted by Nationalist Parliamentarians who,
long ago, exhausted their vocabulary of expletives in dealing with Mr.
Gladstone and each other.

The Bodykers have one leading idea, to "wait yet awhile." Home Rule
will banish the landlords, and give the people the land for nothing at
all. The peasantry are mostly fine-grown men, well-built and
well-nourished, bearing no external trace of the hardships they claim
to have endured. They are civil and obliging, and thoroughly inured to
the interviewer. They have a peculiar accent, of a sing-song
character, which now and then threatens to break down the stranger's
gravity. That the present state of things is intolerable, and cannot
last much longer, they freely admit, but they claim to have the tacit
sympathy of the present Government, and gleefully relate with what
unwillingness police protection was granted to the agent and his men.
They disclaim any intention of shooting or otherwise murdering the
landlord or his officers, and assert that the fact that they still
live is sufficient evidence in this direction. Said one white-headed
man of gentle, deferential manner:--

"The days o' landlord shootin' is gone by. If the Boys wanted to shoot
the Colonel what's to hinder them? Would his double-barrel protect
him, or the four dogs he has about him, that he sends sniffin' an'
growlin' about the threes an' ditches. If the word wint out he
wouldn't live a day, nor his agint nayther. An' his durty emergency
men, that's posted like spies at the house beyant, could be potted any
time they showed their noses. An' couldn't we starve thim out?
Couldn't we cut off their provisions? Why wo