A large tract of uncultivated land. It was farmed at £60 a year. The farmer was a sporting man, fond of races and the like. To simplify his work he had the whole property converted into pasture. But his expensive mode of living obliged him now and then to sell a few head of cattle. The hour came when he had not one calf left, and he found himself utterly incapable of paying his rent. He was evicted. Sure not to find another tenant, on account of the law laid down by the League that every evicted farm should be left unoccupied, the landlord had recourse to the only sort of _métayage_ known in Ireland. (_Métayage_, it should be explained, is the kind of farming used in most French provinces, where the owner of the land enters into yearly partnership with his tenant, and advances the necessary capital in the shape of manure, seed, beasts of burden, and machinery, on the understanding that the crops be shared equally between himself and the tenant.) To return to my Kerry landlord: he set up on his meadows a caretaker, with a salary of twenty-five shillings a week and forty cows to keep. At the end of the first month the tails of ten cows had been chopped off, while two of them had died from suspicious inflammation of the bowels. It became necessary to put the cows, and the caretaker as well, under the protection of a detachment of police. Cost: two pounds a week for each constable. Nett loss at the end of the half-year: £60. The landlord wisely judged that it would be much better to send his cows to the slaughter-house, to pay off caretaker and police, and to forget that he ever was a landowner. In the same district, another farm gone waste. The tenant did not pay. He was evicted, but had another holding close by, where he encamped, and from that vantage-ground sent the following ultimatum to his _ci-devant_ landlord:—“The hay I have left on my late farm is worth £30. I demand fifteen for allowing you to mow and sell it; you shall not see a shilling of it on any other terms.” Fury of the landlord. Then he cools down, thinks better of it, offers ten pounds. The evicted tenant declines the offer; a whole army would not have brought him round. Meanwhile, the hay got rotten.