hundred years. A new landlord coming in possession of the estate, we got
notice to quit, in the middle of winter. My father refused to yield the
hearth of his forefathers without a struggle, and locked himself and
family up. My mother was just after her confinement, and becoming short
of provisions and even of water, she begged of the police who kept guard
to hand her in a drink. They refused. She then begged, for God's sake,
to have a messenger go for the priest. For two days, the police refused
to let any body out of the house, unless we surrendered. My father, who
had cut a hole in the roof of the house to catch at rain water for my
dying mother, made his escape through it. A neighbor, who handed me a
drink of water through a broken pane in a window, had his hand cut off
by a stroke from the police sergeant's sabre. My poor mother died before
the priest arrived. My oldest brother, seeing his mother dead, and that
we had nothing now to guard, surrendered. We were all lodged in jail
that night, and all our means were sold at auction. It was lucky for us
we were put into jail; for, one week from that day, the landlord that
was the cause of all our misery and of my mother's death was shot dead
on the road from our farm to the town of Ennis. If we were out of jail,
we would all have been accused of the cruel landlord's murder, and
hanged; but we were, after one year in prison for the crime of defending
our homestead, liberated, and came out in a body to America. And now I
am glad of it, for two signs of tyranny I find wanting here--landlords
and game laws. The absence of one allows me to trace the steps of the
wild quadruped; and of the other, to trace my title to the soil which I
shall possess, down to the middle of the earth and up to the sky,
unfrowned on, or unawed by the landlord's tyranny or the 'peeler's'
cruelty. This is partly why I like to see these mountains of snow," said
he, "for I think that neither landlords nor 'peelers' could exist here.
They would become buried under these snow banks, for it is by night that
they are generally patrolling the highways, and plotting against the