In Ireland a large number of people on the land simply existed in those days. They knew that if they drained or improved their farms the landlords would raise their rents, so as to sweep away the entire profits arising from their improvements. They were well aware that any enlargement or brightening of their homesteads would cause the agent to scent superfluous money, and put on the screw; for a tenant would be more likely to make an effort to hold on to a comfortable house than to an uncomfortable one. Every staple of thatch put upon the leaky roof, or bucket of whitewash brushed on to the sooty walls of the cabin, gave the landlord a new hold on the tenant, and supplied the agent with a new pretext for increasing the rent for his master, or securing a present for himself. And there were agents so kindly disposed towards the miserable tenants that they preferred one pound as a present to themselves to two pounds added to the landlord’s rent-roll. Under these circumstances tenants of the indolent type did not drain their lands or improve the appearance of their houses; and if they had thriving cattle they kept them concealed in remote fields when the agent was about; and when they were obliged to meet either agent or landlord, they decked themselves out like Jebusites, in ragged and squalid garments. It thus happened that landlords and land agents never saw their tenantry except in rags, and thus the tenants contrived to order themselves lowly and reverently to their betters. The land of the thriftless brought forth potatoes in plenty. A little lime and dike scourings, mixed together, sufficed for manure. The potato seed was planted on the lea-sod, and covered up in ridges four or five feet wide. The elaborate preparation for planting potatoes in drills was then unheard of. Cabbage plants were dibbled into the edges of the ridges, and the potatoes and cabbages grew together. Abundant supplies of _West-reds_ and _Yellow-legs_ and _Copper-duns_, with large Savoy and Drumhead cabbages, only needed to be dug and gathered, to maintain existence. Oats, following the potato crop, provided rough, wholesome bread, and little yellow rats of Kerry cows supplied milk. Great stalwart men and women lived on potatoes three times a day, with bread and buttermilk and an occasional egg. Sometimes, in the autumn, a lean and venerable cow would be fed for a few weeks on the after grass (flesh put on in a hurry being considered more tender) and then killed, salted, and hung up to the black back in the kitchen for family use. This _pièce de résistance_ was the only flesh-meat ever known in the homes of such people.