But Mr. Morris had been made the subject of various requests from his tenants. They had long since wanted and had received a considerable abatement in their rent. Hence had come the straitened limits of L250 a year. They had then offered the "Griffith's valuation." To explain the "Griffith's valuation" a chapter must be written, and as no one would read the explanation if given here it shall be withheld. Indeed, the whole circumstances of Mr. Morris's property were too intricate to require, or to admit, elucidation here. He was so driven that if he were to keep anything for himself he must do so by means of the sheriff's officer, and hence it had come to pass that he had been shot down like a mad dog by the roadside. County Galway was tolerably well used to murders by this time, but yet seemed to be specially astonished by the assassination of Mr. Morris. The innocence of the man; for the dealings of the sheriff's officer were hardly known beyond the town land which was concerned! And then the taciturnity of the county side when the murder had been effected! It was not such a deed as was the slaughtering of poor Florian Jones, or the killing of Terry Carroll in the court house. They had been more startling, more alarming, more awful for the tradesmen, and such like, to talk of among themselves, but the feeling of mystery there had been connected with the secret capacity of one individual. Everyone, in fact, knew that those murders had been done by Lax. And all felt that for the doing of murders Lax was irrepressible. But over there in the neighbourhood of Clonbur, or in the village of Cong, Lax had never appeared. There was no one in the place to whom the police could attribute any Lax-like properties. In that respect, the slaughtering of Mr. Morris had something in it more terrible even than those other murders. It seemed as though murder were becoming the ordinary popular mode by which the people should redress themselves,--as though the idea of murder had recommended itself easily to their intellects. And then they had quietly submitted--all of them--to taciturnity. They who were not concerned in the special case, the adjustment that is of Mr. Morris's rent, accepted his murder with perfect quiescence, as did those who were aggrieved. Nobody had seen anything. Nobody had heard anything. Nobody had known anything. Such were the only replies that were given to the police. If Mr. Morris, then why not another--and another--till the whole country would be depopulated? In Mr. Morris's case a landlord had been chosen; but in other localities agents and sheriffs' officers,--and even those keepers on a property which a gentleman is supposed to employ,--were falling to the right and to the left. But of Mr. Morris and his death nothing was heard.