The County Grand Juries will not hold an honoured place in Irish history, particularly when, as in Kildare, made up of rich men. One of these landlords wrote to my uncle, asking him to pass the account of a certain contractor engaged in mending the road, stating frankly that if that account was not passed the landlord's rent would not be forthcoming. This letter was written politely, addressed on the envelope to 'John Yeats, Esq.' commencing with the usual 'Dear Mr. Yeats.' The work was not well done and my uncle did not pass the account. Thereupon my uncle received another letter addressed to 'Mr. Yeats,' the letter itself commencing with the formal unfriendly 'Dear Sir' and containing an angry complaint that the trees near the writer's park gate were not kept pruned, so that his coachman's hat had been knocked off. The rich Irish landlords were a banditti whom the laws safe-guarded, since it was supposed that upon their allegiance depended the safety of the English connection, and if some were good and kind from the spirit of order many of them were like the man who wrote that impertinent note to my uncle; some indeed were good and kind in themselves but forced to be rapacious and cruel because of the mortgagees who had them in their grip. These mortgagees themselves were often kind old ladies who read their Protestant Bibles and were as gentle as their necessities and piety would permit them to be. Not for worlds, not for anything you could reasonably offer would I revisit Monasterevan. The stones in the walls and the very twisting of the roads would bring back to me all that lost happiness & my Uncle and Aunt & all the little children so innocent and so clever. Perhaps their cleverness was of little avail because of their innocence. To be cut off from sin and evil is to be cut off from so much that, entering into our intricate being, is necessary to mental power and effectiveness. These people lived for other people. To be with them was to find yourself among those to whom your happiness was all that mattered. And I may add that they had great nervous energy, an incessant activity, as the law of their existence. I remember also that they were physically intrepid. The eldest son would ride the wildest horses over the biggest jumps, each time taking his life in his hand, for he never learned to ride well, had some natural incapacity for it which nothing would overcome. The four sons are all dead and gone, happy to the last and unsuccessful. One of the girls is now an old maid, shut away from everyone by some kind of religion of which no one but herself can make head or tail. All these people were merry because they asked nothing for themselves. Yet asking nothing for themselves they got nothing, for so are things constituted.