"We may easily conceive circumstances which would warrant the landlord to suspect this man, so as to have him taken up, and which might ultimately turn out to be so weak as to prevent the production of any evidence whatever. Had the landlord merely put Pat Ring in prison, and let him out again after finding, through a period of three weeks, that he could get no evidence against him, there would be little to complain of, save that the law should not compel the magistrates to bring the accused up for examination, or that the prison authorities should not let the prisoner have an interview with a legal adviser; but the landlord did much more. _While Pat Ring was in jail, the landlord sent and made a wreck of his house and farm; took the roof, thatch, and wood off the barn, stable, and dwelling-house, save in one small portion of the latter; and every handful of the thatch and wood so pulled down was carried away to the landlord's own premises._ The doors and windows he also carried away; pulled down the gates of the farm-yard and the garden, and the garden-wall. These gates were iron, and had been erected by the tenant a few years before at considerable expense. The houses were also all of his own erection; the thatch and timber of the roof, carried away by the landlord, was Pat Ring's own property; _and all was taken away, and the whole place wrecked, without any warrant whatever for so doing; without any right whatever, save the right which, by the laxity of the law and the dominancy of a faction, a landlord, belonging to that dominant faction, may create for himself; without any authority whatever, save the power of his own high hand, against which the law is powerless_. "Pat Ring, after being kept in prison for three weeks, apart from every friend and adviser, and apart from every human creature, save the spies with which every prison in Ireland abounds--(persons who are kept there at the public expense, and who are put to sleep with such men as Pat Ring; and who, pretending to make a confidant of the fresh prisoner, tell tales of the assaults and murders which, as a trap, they profess to have been concerned in--they urging the new prisoner to confess all, to split on his accomplices, and take the reward of L100 at once,--except such companions as these, some of whom I saw produced as witnesses for the Crown at the Kilkenny assizes, thus learning from their own mouths the nature of their diabolical employment)--excepting these, to whom, as Pat Ring declares, he indignantly answered again and again that he had nothing to confess, he saw no human being during his incarceration--was liberated, and went joyfully home; but when he went there, alas! his home was a ruin."