ess dowry than he could get with the ugliest wall-eyed female in
the neighbourhood, he would be considered as an enemy to all his family.

A tenant of a neighbour of mine actually got married to a woman without
a penny, a thing unparalleled in my experience in Kerry, and his sister
presently came to my wife for some assistance.

My wife asked her:--

'Why does not your brother support you?'

And she was answered:--

'How could he support any one after bringing an empty woman to the
house?'

There was a tenant of mine, paying about twenty-five pounds a year rent,
who died, and his son came to me to have his name inscribed in the rent
account.

I asked him what will his father had made.

He replied that he had left him the farm and its stock.

'What's to become of your brother and sister?' says I.

'They are to get whatever I draw,' says he.

'That means whatever you get with your wife?'

'That is so.'

'Well, suppose you marry a girl worth only twenty pounds, what would
happen then?'

'That would not do at all,' very gravely.

'Is there no limit put on the worth of your wife?'

'Oh,' says he, 'I was valued at one hundred and sixty pounds.'

I found out afterwards he had one hundred and seventy with his wife.

A tenant on the Callinafercy estate got married, and the mother-in-law
and the daughter-in-law did not agree. So the elder came to complain to
the landlord of the girl's conduct, and after copiously describing
various delinquencies with the assistance of many invocations of the
saints, she wound up with:--

'And the worst of all, Mr. Marshall, is that she gives herself all the
airs of a three hundred pound girl and she had but a hundred and fifty.'

Filial obedience in the matter of marriage is as uniform in these
classes in Kerry as it is conspicuous by its absence in old English
novels and comedies. The sons never kick at the unions, the daughters
are never hauled weeping to the altar, while an elopement or a refusal
to fulfil a matrimonial engagement would arouse the indignation of the
whole country side.

Decidedly these marriages turn out better than the made-up marriages in
France. I will go further, and seriously affirm my belief that the
marriages in Kerry show a greater average of happiness than any which
can be mentioned. To be sure there is the same dash after heiresses in
Kerry that you see in Mayfair, and the young farmer who is really
well-to-do is as much pursued as the heir