If, therefore, actually, there was not much to separate them on the score of principle, they were widely apart in theory, and the sturdy denizens of the smaller village looked down upon the others as the ignoble slaves of a Saxon tyranny. The village in its entirety--for the division was a purely local and arbitrary one--belonged to Miss Betty O’Shea, forming the extreme edge of her estate as it merged into the vast bog; and, with the habitual fate of frontier populations, it contained more people of lawless lives and reckless habits than were to be found for miles around. There was not a resource of her ingenuity she had not employed for years back to bring these refractory subjects into the pale of a respectable tenantry. Every process of the law had been essayed in turn. They had been hunted down by the police, unroofed, and turned into the wide bog; their chattels had been ‘canted,’ and themselves--a last resource--cursed from the altar; but with that strange tenacity that pertains to life where there is little to live for, these creatures survived all modes of persecution, and came back into their ruined hovels to defy the law and beard the Church, and went on living--in some strange, mysterious way of their own--an open challenge to all political economy, and a sore puzzle to the _Times_ commissioner when he came to report on the condition of the cottier in Ireland. At certain seasons of county excitement--such as an election or an unusually weighty assizes--it was not deemed perfectly safe to visit the village, and even the police would not have adventured on the step except with a responsible force. At other periods, the most marked feature of the place would be that of utter vacuity and desolation. A single inhabitant here and there smoking listlessly at his door--a group of women, with their arms concealed beneath their aprons, crouching under a ruined wall--or a few ragged children, too miserable and dispirited even for play, would be all that would be seen. At a spot where the stream was fordable for a horse, the page Larry had already stationed himself, and now walked into the river, which rose over his knees, to show the road to his mistress. ‘The bailiffs is on them to-day,’ said he, with a gleeful look in his eye; for any excitement, no matter at what cost to others, was intensely pleasurable to him. ‘What is he saying?’ asked Nina. ‘They are executing some process of law against these people,’ muttered Donogan. ‘It’s an old story in Ireland; but I had as soon you had been spared the sight.’ ‘Is it quite safe for yourself?’ whispered she. ‘Is there not some danger in being seen here?’ ‘Oh, if I could but think that you cared--I mean ever so slightly,’ cried he, with fervour, ‘I’d call this moment of my danger the proudest of my life!’