led by so lawless a race, he determined to see for
himself what the conditions really were, so for the first time since
they owned a portion of it, a Kingsnorth set foot on Irish soil.

Accompanied by his two sisters he arrived quietly some few weeks before
and addressed himself at once to the task of understanding the people
and the circumstances in which they lived.

On this particular afternoon he was occupied with his agent, going
systematically through the details of the management of the estate.

It was indeed a discouraging prospect. Such a condition of pauperism
seemed incredible in a village within a few hours of his own England.
Except for a few moderately thriving tradesmen, the whole population
seemed to live from hand to mouth. The entire village was in debt. They
owed the landlords, the tradesmen, they even owed each other money and
goods. It seemed to be a community cut off from the rest of the world,
in which nothing from the outside ever entered. No money was ever put
into the village. On the contrary there was a continuous withdrawal. By
present standards a day would come when the last coin would depart and
the favoured spot would be as independent of money as many of the
poorer people were of clothing.

It came as a shock to Nathaniel Kingsnorth. For the first time it began
to dawn on him that, after all, the agitators might really have some
cause to agitate: that their attitude was not one of merely fighting
for the sake of the fight. Yet a lingering suspicion, borne of his
early training, and his father's doctrines about Ireland, that Pat was
really a scheming, dishonest fellow, obtruded itself on his mind, even
as he became more than half convinced of the little village's desperate
plight.

Nathaniel loathed injustice. As the magistrate of his county he
punished dishonesty. Was the condition he saw due to English injustice
or Irish dishonesty? That was the problem that he was endeavouring to
solve.

"There doesn't seem to be a sixpence circulating through the whole
place," he remarked to the agent when that gentleman had concluded his
statement of the position of matters.

"And there never will be, until some one puts money into the village
instead of taking it out of it," said the agent.

"You refer to the land-owners?"

"I do. And it's many's the time I wrote your father them same words."

"It is surely not unnatural for owners to expect to be paid for the use
of houses and land, is i