ut she, nevertheless, thinks it well to convert her home
into a fortress--perhaps the only one of the kind now extant in
Europe. Here she dwells with a lady-companion, Miss Pringle, far out
of range of such social life as remains in the county, occupied nearly
exclusively with the management of her estate; a matter which, far
from concerning herself alone, entails great vexation, embarrassment,
and expense upon others. The sending of bodies of constabulary half a
hundred strong to protect the officers of the law serving writs on
Miss Gardiner's tenantry is a troublesome and costly business, and has
the effect of stirring up strife and exciting public opinion to no
small degree. As her property is widely scattered over Northern Mayo,
there is generally something going on in her behalf. One day there is
an ejectment at Ballycastle; the next an abortive attempt to evict at
Cloontakilla. In the opinion of the poorer peasantry this eccentric
lady is a malevolent fiend, an "extherminathor," a tyrant striving to
make the lives of the poor so wretched as to drive them off her
estate. "A sthrange lady is she, Sorr," cried one of her tenants to
me. "Och, she's a divil of a woman, entoirely. All she wants is to
hunt the poor off the face of the wor-r-rold." There are, however, to
this question, as to every Irish question, two sides--if not more. If
Miss Gardiner "hunts" her tenants off her estate, Lord Erne's people
are just now trying their best to perform the same operation upon
Captain Boycott.

It is not all at once that Farmhill has become a sort of dreary
edition of Castle Rackrent, oppressing the mind with almost
inexpressible gloom. The owner's feud with her tenants began long
before the Land League was known. It is said in Northern Mayo that her
father was the first of the "exterminators," justly or unjustly so
called, and that the traditions of the family have been heartily
carried out by his heiress. There is perhaps very little doubt that
Miss Gardiner, like Lord Lucan and the Marquis of Sligo, prefers large
farmers as tenants to a crowd of miserable peasants striving to
extract a living for an entire family from a paltry patch of five
acres of poor land; but whatever her wish may be she has undoubtedly a
large number of small tenants on her estate at the present moment. It
is therefore probable that she is somewhat less of an exterminatrix
than the exasperated people represent her to be. In their eyes,
however, she i