The affair at Woodford marks a date in the annals of the Irish revolution. One has seen in it peasants living in relatively good circumstances fight for principles and go to the furthest ends of legality,—without overstepping them. Moreover, these events have taken place in a county famed for its violence and represented in Parliament by Mr. Matthew Harris, which is saying enough; (his motto was, till lately, “When you see a landlord, shoot him down like a partridge”). Three or four years sooner such events could not have taken place without involving fifteen or twenty deaths of persons. Here not a single one occurred. One could not but acknowledge that the honour of this was due to the League, to its moderating and constitutional influence. In vain it protested that it had nothing to do with those conflicts; its agents and its general instructions played the first part in it. Therefore it reaped all the fruits of this, came out of the ordeal greater, surrounded with a poetical halo, sovereign. History often has such ironies. At the price of their domestic happiness, four obscure heroes had just won in face of public opinion the cause of the serfs of the glebe against the lords. CHAPTER XV. THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN. SLIGO. In all the cabins I enter, the first object that meets my eyes on the wall, besides a portrait of Parnell or Gladstone, is, enshrined between the bit of sacred palm and the photograph of the emigrant son, a sheet of printed paper, sometimes put under a glass, and headed by these words, “The Plan of Campaign.” This is a summary of the instructions given by the League to its followers in November, 1886, and of the various means by which the position may be made untenable by the landlords. That order of the day of the agrarian army was, however, absent from the house furniture of one of my friends, Mat Cloney; he was a fisherman on the Garvogue, near Lough Gill, and close to the ruins of the Abbey of Sligo; an old man of hale and pleasing countenance, whose weather-beaten face was shaded by a plenteous crop of gray hair, and lighted up by two wonderfully bright blue eyes: a true Celt in manner and appearance. When I entered his cabin for the first time he was engaged in preparing his dinner; this consisted of a dried herring and a cold potato; but tearing down from a hook near the fire-place a small piece of bacon, the old man hastily rubbed it over a frying-pan, which he set on the dying embers; in it he placed the herring. A great noise and spluttering followed, then Mat, mindful of future feasts, thriftily hung his piece of bacon back on its hook, and the herring being done, sat down to his meagre repast. “You see, sir,” he said contentedly, “it gives it a relish.”