CHAPTER IV

NATHANIEL KINGSNORTH VISITS IRELAND


While the incidents of the foregoing chapters were taking place,
the gentleman whose ownership shaped the destinies of many of the
agitators of St. Kernan's Hill, was confronting almost as difficult
a problem as O'Connell was facing on the mount.

Whilst O'Connell was pleading for the right of Ireland to govern
herself, Mr. Nathaniel Kingsnorth was endeavouring to understand how
to manage so unwieldy and so troublesome an estate.

The death of his father placed a somewhat extensive--and so far
entirely unprofitable--portion of the village in his care. His late
father had complained all his life of the depreciation of values;
the growing reluctance to pay rents; and the general dying-out of
the worth of an estate that had passed into the hands of a
Kingsnorth many generations before in the ordinary course of
business, for notes that had not been taken up, and mortgages that
had been foreclosed.

It was the open boast of the old gentleman that he had never seen
the village, and it was one of his dying gratifications that he
would never have to.