[2] A later instance. On August 30th, 1887, two men armed with guns and wearing masks entered the house of Mr. R. Blennerhasset, at Kells, near Cahirciveen; they went upstairs to Mrs. Blennerhasset’s room and demanded money, which they got to the amount of about £2. [3] My guide was quite right. In a statistical table of trials between July, 1885, and July, 1886, for the County Kerry, I find the following items: _maiming cattle_, 9; _injury to person_, 7; _murders_, 3; _firing at persons_, 8; _firing into houses_, 15; _threatening letters_, 125; _intimidation_, 36; _malicious injury_, 22; _arson_, 19; _assaults_, 22. The above figures, it should be observed, only relate to outrages brought home to their authors; there can be no doubt that a much larger number of agrarian outrages remain unpunished. [4] See Appendix, p. 331. APPENDIX. _EXTRACTS FROM SOME LETTERS ADDRESSED WITHIN THE LAST TWO YEARS TO AN IRISH LANDLORD BY HIS TENANTS._ The _Times_ has published, on October 10, 1887, an exceedingly interesting batch of letters selected from some three hundred addressed within the last two years to an Irish landowner by his tenants. As the editor of those letters wrote most appropriately, there is perhaps no means whereby truer insight can be obtained into the ways and habits of the Irish peasantry than by studying the letters written by the people themselves. Typically enough, however, the same editor only saw in those letters how “unbusiness-like and illogical is the Irish tenant,” and “the various reasons that an Irishman gives for not paying his rent. One is unable to pay because his uncle is confined to bed, and his daughter suffering from a sore eye; another because a relative has died; a third because his brother-in-law has brought an action against him for money lent, and he has had to pay; one because his family is small, and another because it is large; another—and this is the most common excuse—because he has been unable to sell his stock; another because his wife has a sore hand; another because of the death of a cow; another because the weather is severe and there is a sheriff’s bailiff obstructing him from making up the rent; another because it was God’s will to take all the means he had; another because of the agitation.” Reasons which, it may be seen, appear to the English eye entirely ridiculous and unbusiness-like. What strikes a Frenchman most, on the other hand, in the letters, is their touching simplicity, the appalling instability of a budget that the least domestic mishap is enough to upset, and the fruitless attempt of the poor man to penetrate into the real cause of the burden under which he is panting; in the comments, the utter incapacity of the British landlord to understand his Irish tenantry even when he is a good landlord, which is obviously (perhaps too obviously) the case here.