the terms which they proposed to me.  I heard nothing more from them till about the middle of February 1887, when coming to my office one day I found two tenants waiting for me.  One was Stephen Maher, a mountain man, and the other Patrick Kehoe.  ‘What do you want?’ I asked.  Whereupon they both arose, and Pat Kehoe pointed to Maher.  Maher fumbled at his clothes, and rubbed himself softly for a bit, and then produced a scrap of paper.  ‘It’s a bit of paper from the tenants, sir,’ he said.  A queer bit of paper it was to look at—­ruled paper, with a composition written upon it which might have been the work of a village schoolmaster.  It was neither signed nor addressed!  The pith of it was in these words,—­’in consequence of the manner in which we have been harassed, our cattle driven throughout the country, and our crops not sown, we shall be unable to pay the half-year’s rent due in March, in addition to the reduction already claimed!’ I own I rather lost my temper at this!  Remember I had already plainly refused to give ’the reduction already claimed,’ and had told them not once, but twenty times, that I would never surrender to the ‘Plan of Campaign’!  I am afraid my language was Pagan rather than Parliamentary—­but I told them plainly, at least, that if they did not break from the Plan of Campaign, and pay their debts, they might be sure I would turn the whole of them out!  I gave them back their precious bit of paper and sent them packing.

“One of them, I have told you, was a mountain man, Stephen Maher.  He is commonly known among the people as ‘the old fox of the mountain,’ and he is very proud of it!

“This old Stephen Maher,” said Mr. Brooke, “is renowned in connection with a trial for murder, at which he was summoned as a witness.  When he was cross-examined by Mr. Molloy, Q.C., he fenced and dodged about with that distinguished counsellor for a long time, until getting vexed by the lawyer’s persistency, he exclaimed, ’Now thin, Mr. Molloy, I’d have ye to know that I had a cliverer man nor iver you was, Mr. Molloy, at me, and I had to shtan’ up to him for three hours before the Crowner, an’ he was onable to git the throoth out of me, so he was! so he was!’”

Neither did Dr. Dillon mention the fact that one of the demands made of Captain Hamilton, Mr. Brooke’s agent, in December 1886, was that a Protestant tenant named Webster should be evicted by Mr. Brooke from a farm for which he had paid his rent, to make room for the return thither of a Roman Catholic tenant named Lenahan, previously evicted for non-payment of his rent.

When Mr. Brooke’s grandfather bought the Coolgreany property in 1864, he adopted a system of betterments, which has been ever since kept up on the estate.  Nearly every tenant’s house on the property has been slated, and otherwise repaired by the landlord, nor has one penny ever been added on that account to the rents.

In the village of Coolgreany all the houses on one side of the main street were built in this way by the landlord, and the same thing was done in the village of Croghan, where twenty tenants have a grazing right of three sheep for every acre held on the Croghan Mountain, pronounced by the valuers of the Land Court to be one of the best grazing mountains in Ireland.