e kindliness
and honesty of Mayo men, and of their peculiar ideas of right and
justice. Miss Gardiner's tenants would not pay her a shilling; they
were prepared to resist eviction by force, and would have been backed
by the whole country side, but they paid the sub-sheriff with the
first money they got. He had stood their friend, and they could not
act meanly towards him.

As a contrast to this pleasant picture I am compelled to draw one not
altogether so agreeable. I mentioned in a previous letter a
particularly "tough customer" who, owing L24 for three years' rent,
would part neither with a single shilling nor with the land. I thought
this champion of the irreconcilables must be worth a visit, and
foregoing the diversion of a call on Tom Molloy, a noted character in
the Ballina district, I drove out in the direction of Cloontakilla. On
the way to that dismal spot by a diabolical road I passed a homestead,
so neat and trim, standing on the hillside clear of trees, that I at
once asked if it were not owned by a Scotchman, and was answered that
Mr. Petrie was indeed a Scot and a considerable tenant farmer. On one
side of his farm was a knot of dismantled houses, telling their story
plainly and pathetically enough, and on the further side stood a row
of hovels, only one of which was uninhabited. The locked-up cabin had
a brace of bullet-holes in the door, those which caused a great deal
of trouble some time since. A Mr. Joynt it seems, in a wild freak,
fired his gun through the door of the cabin occupied by Mistress
Murphy, who with her children is now about to join her husband in
America. Instead of being frightened the courageous matron opened the
door, issued therefrom armed with a fire-shovel and administered to
the delinquent "the greatest batin' begorra" my informant had ever
heard of. Afterwards the law was invoked against Mr. Joynt, who was
esteemed very lucky in escaping punishment on account of his
ill-health. A little further on, still to the right of the road,
branched off suddenly a narrow bridle-path, or "boreen," as it is
called in this part of the country. It was my car-driver, a
teetotaller, opined on this "boreen," that the irreconcilable tenant,
one Thomas Browne, dwelt. There were doubts in his mind; but,
nevertheless, we turned on to the wretched track, and tried to get the
car over the stones and mud-lakes which formed it. It could not be
strictly called a road of any kind, but was rather a space le