As the leading spirit of the agitation, Tully had put a garrison into his house of twelve men and two women. He had dug a ditch around it, taken out the window-sashes, filled up the casements and the doorways with stones and trunks of trees. Portholes had been pierced under the roof, through which the defenders might thrust red-hot pikes, pitchforks, and other weapons, and empty pails of boiling water upon the assailants. A brief parley took place. Tully refused to make any offer of a settlement unless the agent would agree to reinstate all the evicted tenants, to which Mr. Tener replied that he would recognise no "combination," but was ready to deal with every tenant fairly and individually. Finally the Sheriff ordered his men to take the place. Ladders were planted, and while some of the constables, under the protection of a shield covered with zinc, a sort of Roman _testudo_, worked at removing the earthern ramparts, others nimbly climbed to the roof and began to break in from above. In their excitement the garrison helped this forward by breaking holes through the roof themselves to get at the attacking party, and in about twenty minutes the fortress was captured, and the inmates were prisoners. Two constables were burned by the red-hot pikes, the gun of another was broken to pieces by a huge stone, and a fourth was slightly wounded by a fork. One of the defenders got a sword-cut; and Tully was brought forth as one too severely wounded to walk. Upon investigation, however, the surgeon refused to certify that he was unable to undergo the ordinary imprisonment in such cases made and provided. The collapse of the resistance at this central point was followed by a general surrender. After the capture of Tully's house, Mr. Tener writes to me, "I found it being gutted by his family, who would have carried it away piecemeal. They had already taken away the flooring of one of the rooms." Thereupon Mr. Tener had the house pulled down, with the result of seeing a statement made in a leading Nationalist paper that he was "evicting the tenants and pulling down their houses." "Yesterday," Mr. Tener writes to me on the 9th of September, "I walked twenty-five miles, visiting thirty farms about Portumna. Except in two or three cases, the tenants have ample means, and part of the live stock alone on the farms, exclusive of the crops, would suffice to pay all the rents I had demanded. On the farms recently 'evicted,' I found treble the amount of the rent due in live stock alone." As to one case of these recent evictions, I found it stated in an Irish journal that a young man, who had been ill of consumption for two years, the son of a tenant, was removed from the house, the local physician refusing to certify that he was unfit for removal, and that he died a few days afterwards. The implication was obvious, and I asked Mr. Tener for the facts.