I explained that this was pure truth. In few words I told him how, shortly before the _Ribillion_ dear to his heart, the French peasants had risen as one man to get rid of their own landlords; how those landlords had for the most part emigrated and taken up arms against their country, which had caused the confiscation and sale of their lands. I added that those lands were now the property of the French labourers, who highly appreciate this state of affairs. Mat Cloney listened to me, his eyes glistening with interest. Therefore, I was rather surprised when I stopped, and he abruptly asked me, as a conclusion: “Do you know any of those Sligo gentlemen who come fishing about here, sir?” “Indeed, I do not. I am a total stranger in these parts. It was the manager at my hotel who sent me to you.” “That’s roight!” he exclaimed, as if relieved from some anxiety. “In that case, sir, I am going to show you something!...” He went to a corner of the cabin, and after some rummaging in an old sailor’s box, he produced from it a neatly folded paper which he placed into my hands. I opened it with some curiosity. It was a supplementary sheet of the _United Ireland_, of Dublin, where stood _in extenso_ the League’s Plan of Campaign. I looked at Mat Cloney. He was laughing silently. I at last understood the riddle. The sly fox was at heart with the League (he dubbed it _the Leg_; by the way, like many other Irishmen); but he judged it prudent in any case to dissemble such subversive feelings, when he had to do with an unknown person from the town; and being a peasant he rather overdid it. The ice was broken now. He let me study thoroughly the document he had lent me, and even enriched it with luminous commentaries, in the course of a pleasant day’s fishing. * * * * * The “Plan of Campaign” seems to have had for its father Mr. John Dillon, one of the most universally, and the most deservedly, popular of the Irish members; at all events, it was introduced to the public by that gentleman in October, 1886, at an autumn meeting. Those mass meetings, held every year after the harvest, have now become an institution, a kind of _Witena-gemot_ of the Irish nation. People come to them from the farthest ends of the island, by rail, in jaunting-cars, on foot, on horseback, as the case may be; in such numbers that there is no room or shanty large enough in the country to lodge the assemblage. So they are open-air meetings. The particular one alluded to was convened at Woodford, which has become, since the memorable battle on the Clanricarde estate, a kind of Holy Place and agrarian Kaaba. Soon after the autumn meeting, the scheme was approved by the authorities, at the head-quarters of the League (although they prudently refrained from committing themselves officially to it), and expounded in the special supplement to the _United Ireland_, of which I hold a copy. It was to the following effect:—