if you have an acre more or an acre less?' Neither had any one a lease,
nor, indeed, a writing of any kind. Gill settled that on the 25th March and
25th September a certain sum was to be forthcoming, and that was all. When
'the lord' wanted them, they were always to give him a hand, which often
meant with their carts and horses, especially in harvest-time. Not that
they were a hard-worked or hard-working population: they took life very
easy, seeing that by no possible exertion could they materially better
themselves; and even when they hunted a neighbour's cow out of their wheat,
they would execute the eviction with a lazy indolence and sluggishness that
took away from the act all semblance of ungenerousness.

They were very poor, their hovels were wretched, their clothes ragged, and
their food scanty; but, with all that, they were not discontented, and very
far from unhappy. There was no prosperity at hand to contrast with their
poverty. The world was, on the whole, pretty much as they always remembered
it. They would have liked to be 'better off' if they knew how, but they did
not know if there were a 'better off,' much less how to come at it; and if
there were, Peter Gill certainly did not tell them of it.

If a stray visitor to fair or market brought back the news that there was
an agitation abroad for a new settlement of the land, that popular orators
were proclaiming the poor man's rights and denouncing the cruelties of
the landlord, if they heard that men were talking of repealing the laws
which secured property to the owner, and only admitted him to a sort of
partnership with the tiller of the soil, old Gill speedily assured them
that these were changes only to be adopted in Ulster, where the tenants
were rack-rented and treated like slaves. 'Which of you here,' would he
say, 'can come forward and say he was ever evicted?' Now as the term was
one of which none had the very vaguest conception--it might, for aught they
knew, have been an operation in surgery--the appeal was an overwhelming