nto which they now drove, was, in every
detail of wretchedness, dirt, ruin, and desolation, intensely Irish. A
small branch of the well-known bog-stream, the 'Brusna,' divided one
part of the village from the other, and between these two settlements so
separated there raged a most rancorous hatred and jealousy, and Cruhan-beg,
as the smaller collection of hovels was called, detested Cruhan-bawn with
an intensity of dislike that might have sufficed for a national antipathy,
where race, language, and traditions had contributed their aids to the
animosity.

There was, however, one real and valid reason for this inveterate jealousy.
The inhabitants of Cruhan-beg--who lived, as they said themselves, 'beyond
the river'--strenuously refused to pay any rent for their hovels; while
'the cis-Brusnaites,' as they may be termed, demeaned themselves to the
condition of tenants in so far as to acknowledge the obligation of rent,
though the oldest inhabitant vowed he had never seen a receipt in his life,
nor had the very least conception of a gale-day.

If, therefore, actually, there was not much to separate them on the score
of principle, they were widely apart in theory, and the sturdy denizens of
the smaller village looked down upon the others as the ignoble slaves of a
Saxon tyranny. The village in its entirety--for the division was a purely
local and arbitrary one--belonged to Miss Betty O'Shea, forming the extreme
edge of her estate as it merged into the vast bog; and, with the habitual
fate of frontier populations, it contained more people of lawless lives and
reckless habits than were to be found for miles around. There was not a
resource of her ingenuity she had not employed for years back to bring
these refractory subjects into the pale of a respectable tenantry. Every
process of the law had been essayed in turn. They had been hunted down by
the police, unroofed, and turned into the wide bog; their chattels had been
'canted,' and themselves--a last resource--cursed from the altar; but with
that strange tenacity that pertains to life where there is little to live
for, these creatures survived all modes of persecution, and came back into
their ruined hovels to defy the law and beard the Church, and went on
living--in some strange, mysterious way of their own--an open challenge to
all political economy, and a sore puzzle to the _Times_ commissioner when
he came to report on the condition of the cottier in Ireland.

At certain