The people took O'Brien's advice, withholding Mr. Smith-Barry's rent, keeping in their purses what was due to him, in order that somebody's tenants in the next county might get better terms. Still Mr. Smith-Barry held out, and the Land League determined to make of him a terrible example. He owned most of the town. Happy thought! let the shopkeepers leave his hated tenements. Let their habitations be desolate and no man to dwell in their tents. The Land League can build another Tipperary over the way, the tenants can hop across, and Mr. Smith-Barry will be left in the lurch! The end, it was thought, would justify the means, and some sacrifice was expected. Things would not work smoothly at first. The homes of their fathers were void; new dunghills, comparatively flavourless, had to be made, the old accretions, endeared by ancestral associations, had to be abandoned, and the old effluvium weakened by distance was all that was left to them. The new town was off the main line of trade and traffic, but it was thought that these, with the old Tipperary odour, would come in time. Streets and marts were built by the Land League at a cost of L20,000 or more. The people moved away, but they soon moved back again. The shopkeepers could do no business, so with bated breath and whispering humbleness they returned to Mr. Smith-Barry. The mart was declared illegal, and the old one was re-opened. But while the agitation continued, the town was possessed by devils. Terrorism and outrage abounded on every side. The local papers published the names of men who dared to avow esteem for Mr. Smith-Barry, or who were supposed to favour his cause. The Tipperary boys threw bombshells into their houses, pigeon-holed their windows with stones, threw blasts of gun-powder with burning fuses into their homes. They were pitilessly boycotted, and a regular system of spies watched their goings out and their comings in. If they were shopkeepers everything was done to injure them, and people who patronised them were not only placed on the Black List but were assaulted on leaving the shops, and their purchases taken by violence and destroyed. Broken windows and threats of instant death were so common as to be unworthy of mention, and the hundred extra armed policemen who were marched into the town were utterly powerless against the prevailing rowdyism of the Nationalist party. Honest men were coerced into acting as though dishonest, and one unfortunate man, who had in a moment of weakness paid half-a-year's rent, pitifully besought Mr. Smith-Barry's agent to sue him along with the rest, and declared he would rather pay it over again than have it known that the money had been paid. "Ye can pay a year's gale for six months, but ye can't rise again from the dead," said this pious victim to circumstances.