the position of chamberlain (sic) ...  At Aghadoe House now resides that ruthless Sam Hussey.  Allow me to give you an outline of this heartless fellow’s antecedents.  This Hussey is of English origin and was formerly a cattle-dealer, and practised usury as far back as 1845.  If all Ireland were to be searched for a similar despot he would not be found.  He is a regular anti-Christ and Orangeman at heart, and, in fact, he acts as agent for all the bankrupt landlords in Kerry.  An English-Irish landlord is an alien in heart, a despot by instinct, an absentee by inclination; and all the foul confederacy of landlordism in Kerry is always in direct opposition to the cause of Ireland.’

There is a copious mendacity about that effusion which makes me think the real mission of the writer should have been to become an Irish Member of Parliament.  His powers of misrepresentation would have raised him to an eminence among obstructionists.

After all, scurrilous denunciation never affected me.  His life by Sir Wemyss Reid reveals how Mr. W.E.  Forster flinched under the vituperation levelled at his head.  But he was not an Irishman, least of all a Kerry man, and so he never felt the fun of the fray, the grim earnest of the fight which made me set my teeth and give as good as I received.  Indeed, I’ll take my oath no man had the better of me, either in bandying words or yet in acts, so long as they were open and above-board, but it has always been the way of sedition and conspiracy to hit below the belt.

CHAPTER XIX

MURDER, OUTRAGE AND CRIME

Once launched upon memories of those horrible perpetrations by so-called Christians, which disgraced alike my native country and all Christendom (because the criminals nominally worshipped the same God, and professed reverence to Him), I could enumerate instances until I had filled a volume.

You know how the Ghost told Hamlet that he could a tale unfold, whose lightest word would harrow up his soul.  Why, I could tell five score, and still not have exhausted the roll of crime.

As my experience is mainly connected with Kerry, it is characteristically Irish for me to start with an example from County Cork.  The outrage was on the Rathcole estate of Sir George Colthurst.  The rental was L1500, and the landlord had expended L10,000 on improvements, so that it was not to be wondered that the labourers should meet to celebrate their employer’s marriage.

Nor to any one knowing Ireland was it surprising that the Land League should have despatched one of their well-armed bands to fire on them for so doing.

This was apparently a challenge to Kerry not to be outdone in barbarity by Cork, her neighbour and rival.

Kerry was quite equal to current demands on her inhumanity.

A labourer of the M’Gillycuddys was visited by another Land League detachment and had his ear, a la Bulgaria, cut clean off to the bone, because he worked on a farm from which a tenant had been evicted.