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CHAPTER IV.

FROM CARRAROE TO CONG.

We drove up to the

IN the last chapter I described our approach to the village of Carraroe. shop in which, according to our driver, everything could be obtained which was obtainable in Galway, and found that, if this was indeed the case, the Galway trade must be limited to tea, sugar, and tobacco, and some few necessaries of life. The police again watched our movements, and the people were as hospitable as before. They insisted on giving us some lunch, and making tea for us. With this tea a most comical incident is connected.

Miss Yates, a lady from

the Land League, had been staying at Carraroe, and instructing the girls of the place in the arts of spinning, needle-work, and all kinds of embroidery. She had just left her sphere of labour, and gone to Dublin to place in the National Exhibition some of its results, and had left with our entertainers a small sheaf of one-pound notes,

being part of the earnings of the busy workers. The tea-pot, as is often the case, appeared to the people the best available money-box, and in this they accordingly deposited the notes; but unfortunately they had neglected to see that the tea-pot was empty, and in fact it was half full of tea. Consequently, when they attempted to make tea for us, they found the notes and the ancient tea-leaves reduced to much the same appearance and consistency by long soaking in the same solution. Loud were the lamentations, and pitiable the aspect of the sodden bank-notes; but we comforted the luckless owners by assuring them that if the notes were carefully spread out to dry they would be just as good as new, and that their tawny tinge would not detract from their money value.

After lunch we went down to the bay and hired a boat, passing a soldier on our way, whom we asked what he had to do in this part of the country. He replied, 'To protect an old fellow up here,' and pointed out to us the house in which the agent lived whose difficult duty it was to collect rents from the impoverished tenants around. We were then rowed across the bay to the village of Rossmuck, where we called upon the priest,

as the person most likely to be able to inform us as to the state of his parish.

He was extremely courteous, and gave us some most interesting details. The poverty of a large portion of his parishioners was desperate. He knew families where the children were naked until seven or eight years old from this cause. Having himself been present at the eviction of more than a hundred households, he had seen the amount of their portable property; and the sheriff who was superintending the work of ejecting it from the houses told him that he had not found one bed or one pound's worth of food among the whole lot. This seemed to me incredible, but he assured me that it accorded with his own experience. asked him if any cases of especially harsh evictions had occurred in his parish, and he told me of a man who had paid his own rent in full, but was evicted because the copartner in his lease could not pay his share; and then, for re-entering his house after the eviction, he had been at once sent to gaol. I failed at first to understand what legal power the landlord could have to evict a tenant who had paid his own rent, on account of the shortcomings of his neighbours; but the priest explained to me that, with a view to the extra

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security of their rents, the landlords often insist on a system of partnership in leases, in accordance with which several men sign the same lease, and then, if any one of them fails to pay his own particular rent, the landlord has the power to evict them all. Thus each individual has a motive for keeping his neighbour up to the mark in the way of being ready with his money on rent-day.

I further inquired whether the rents were generally fair in the parish, and whether the landlords had taken any share in the improving and reclamation of the land, which had evidently been going on to a very large extent. He replied that they had taken no share whatever in the improvements beyond raising the rents, often more than 100 per cent., in consequence of them. I thought this must be an exaggeration, and asked for some facts, and he at once supplied me with plenty. The following table will show in a few cases the difference between the rents twenty years ago, the valuation, and the present rents :

These facts he vouched for as absolutely exact, and he showed me many more of the same kind, but these are enough to show that, whether the holding is large or small, the increase of rent is enormous, and amounts to a practical confiscation of the tenants' improvements.

He gave the same high praise to the morality of the people which I had already heard in other quarters, and told some interesting anecdotes calculated to show to what an extent the priest is bound up with his people, and how he can help them in many ways when they are in trouble, or refuse to help them if they are bad characters. Nothing had hitherto surprised me more than the way in which the majority of the priests sympathise with the Land Agitation, as I had expected to find that the discipline of the Church of Rome would discountenance all efforts directed against the constituted authorities; but, on the contrary, most of the clergy are Land Leaguers heart and soul. They reply to this that, when they see their flock suffering from harsh treatment and unjust laws, it is their duty to do all they can to help them towards getting the laws altered; and there is another reason, which appeals to their pockets as well as to their sympathy, for if the