The Marquis of Clanricarde vouchsafed no manner of answer. Then, Father Egan put himself in motion. He first obtained from the Bishop of Clonfert that he would send a second petition to the master, representing to him the true state of affairs, the reduction consented to by the other landlords, &c. Lord Clanricarde did not even acknowledge reception of the prelate’s letter. Let us state here, once for all, that he never swerved from the attitude he had adopted from the beginning, so aggressive in its very stolidity. Never once did he depart from that silence, except when he once wrote to the _Times_ that, personally, he did not object to the proposed reduction, but was in the habit of leaving to his agent the care of that sort of thing. Seeing that there was no satisfaction whatever to be expected from him, the Woodford tenants imitated their landlord, and henceforth gave no sign of life, or paid him a single farthing. In the month of April, 1886, Joyce resorted to the legal ways and set up prosecutions against thirty-eight of the principal farmers, whose debt was £20 and above, assuming by that move the attitude of a moderate man who has to deal with obvious unwillingness to pay. And it was that which gave to the Woodford affair its peculiar character, which made it a _test case_, a decisive trial where the contending forces have measured their strength, where the inmost thought of the Irish peasant has shown itself in full light. If the chiefs of the League had singled it out from amidst a hundred (as, indeed, we may believe they did, whatever they might aver to the contrary), they could never have achieved a more complete demonstration of their power. Chance, however, had also its usual share in the turn which affairs took. Joyce, it appears, had began prosecutions against seventy-eight lesser tenants, and at the moment when success was on the point of crowning his efforts, the procedure was quashed for some legal flaw. As for the bigger ones, judgment had been entered against them, and the execution followed. The first step was the selling out in public court of the tenant’s interest in his holding. Ten of the men capitulated immediately, paying the rent in full with interest and law costs, that is to say, about 80 per cent. above the original debt. As for the twenty-eight others, fired by political passion, pride, and the ardent exhortations of Father Egan, they did not waver, and allowed the sale to proceed. Agreeably to the usage established since the League has been supreme in Ireland, not one bidder came forward at the sale. The representative of the landlord therefore remained master of the situation, and got for a few shillings the interest of the twenty-eight farmers—interest which, in certain cases, was worth £200 and more.