't
been here since he paid the last of his old rent; and then he as
good as threw it in Corny's face, I thought.

LARRY. No wonder! Of course they all hated us like the devil.
Ugh! [Moodily] I've seen them in that office, telling my father
what a fine boy I was, and plastering him with compliments, with
your honor here and your honor there, when all the time their
fingers were itching to beat his throat.

AUNT JUDY. Deedn why should they want to hurt poor Corny? It was
he that got Mat the lease of his farm, and stood up for him as an
industrious decent man.

BROADBENT. Was he industrious? That's remarkable, you know, in an
Irishman.

LARRY. Industrious! That man's industry used to make me sick,
even as a boy. I tell you, an Irish peasant's industry is not
human: it's worse than the industry of a coral insect. An
Englishman has some sense about working: he never does more than
he can help--and hard enough to get him to do that without
scamping it; but an Irishman will work as if he'd die the moment
he stopped. That man Matthew Haffigan and his brother Andy made a
farm out of a patch of stones on the hillside--cleared it and dug
it with their own naked hands and bought their first spade out of
their first crop of potatoes. Talk of making two blades of wheat
grow where one grew before! those two men made a whole field of
wheat grow where not even a furze bush had ever got its head up
between the stones.

BROADBENT. That was magnificent, you know. Only a great race is
capable of producing such men.

LARRY. Such fools, you mean! What good was it to them? The moment
they'd done it, the landlord put a rent of 5 pounds a year on
them, and turned them out because they couldn't pay it.

AUNT JUDY. Why couldn't they pay as well as Billy Byrne that took
it after them?

LARRY [angrily]. You know very well that Billy Byrne never paid
it. He only offered it to get possession. He never paid it.

AUNT JUDY. That was because Andy Haffigan hurt him with a brick
so that he was never the same again. Andy had to run away to
America for it.

BROADBENT [glowing with indignation]. Who can blame him, Miss
Doyle? Who can blame him?

LARRY [impatiently]. Oh, rubbish! What's the good of the man
that's starved out of a farm murdering the man that's starved
into it? Would you have done such a thing?

BROADBENT. Yes. I--I--I--I--[stammering with fury] I should have
shot the confounded landlord, and wrung the neck of the damned
agen