arty upon fuel and lights. Nor was this
all. The landlord found himself further obliged to employ men from the
same Property Defence Association to cut and save the hay-crop on the
land, and when this had been done no one could be found to buy the crop.
The crop and the lands were "boycotted." It was only in May last that a
purchaser could be found for the hay cut and saved two years ago--this
purchaser being himself a "boycotted" man on an adjoining property. He
bought the hay, paying for it a price which did not quite cover one-half
the cost of sowing it!

"No one denies for a moment," said the agent, "that the tenant in all
this business has been more than fairly, even generously, treated by the
estate; yet no one seems to think it anything but natural and reasonable
that he should demand, as he now demands, to be put back into the
possession of his forfeited tenancy at a certain rent fixed by himself,"
which he will obligingly agree to pay, "provided that the hay cut and
saved on the property two years ago is accounted for to him by the
estate!"

In another case an agent, Mr. Ivough, had to deal with a body of five
hundred tenants on a considerable estate. Of these tenants, two hundred
settled their rents with the landlord before the passing of the Land Act
of 1881, and valuations made by the landlord's valuer, with their full
assent. There was no business for the lawyers, so far as they were
concerned, and no compulsion of any sort was put on them. Among them was
a man who had married the daughter of an old tenant on the estate, and
so came into a holding of 12 Irish, or more than 20 statute, acres, at a
rental of L18 a year. The valuer reduced this to L14, 10s., which
satisfied the tenant, and as the agent agreed to make this reduced
valuation retroactive, all went as smoothly as possible for two years,
when the tenant began to fall into arrears. When the Sub-Commissioners,
between 1885 and 1887, took to making sweeping reductions, the tenants
who had settled freely under the recent valuation grumbled bitterly. As
one of them tersely put it to the agent, "We were a parcel of bloody
fools, and you ought to have told us these Sub-Commissioners were
coming!" Mr. Sweeney, the tenant by marriage already mentioned, was not
content to express his particular dissatisfaction in idle words, but
kept on going into arrears. In May 1888 things came to a crisis. The
agent refused to accept a settlement which included the payme