Cormac O’Daly, whom all the elders remembered as a mere “pote” and man of business for the O’Mahonys, had suddenly in his old age blossomed forth as The O’Daly, and as master of Muirisc. Like many other changes which afflict human recollection, this had all come about by reason of a woman’s vain folly. Mrs. Fergus O’Mahony, having vainly cast alluring glances upon successive relays of mining contractors and superintendents, and of fish-buyers from Bristol and the Isle of Man, and even, in the later stages, upon a sergeant of police--had at last actually thrown herself in marriage at the grizzled head of the hereditary bard. It cannot be said that the announcement of this ill-assorted match had specially surprised the good people of Muirisc. They had always felt that Mrs. Fergus would ultimately triumph in her matrimonial resolutions, and the choice of O’Daly, though obviously enough a last resort, did not shock their placid minds. It was rather satisfactory than otherwise, when they came to think of it, that the arrangement should not involve the introduction of a stranger, perhaps even of an Englishman. But now, after nearly three years of this marriage, with a young O’Daly already big enough to walk by himself among the pigs and geese in the square--they said to themselves that even an Englishman would have been better, and they bracketed the connubial tendencies of Mrs. Fergus and the upstart ambition of Cormac under a common ban of curses. O’Daly had no sooner been installed in the castle than he had raised the rents. Back had come the odious charge for turf-cutting, the tax on the carrigeens and the tithe-levy upon the gathered kelp. In the best of times these impositions would have been sorely felt; the cruel failure of the potatoes in 1877 and ’78 had elevated them into the domain of the tragic. For the first time in its history Muirisc had witnessed evictions. Half way up the cliff stood the walls of four cottages, from which the thatched roofs had been torn by a sheriff’s posse of policeman during the bleakest month of winter. The gloomy spectacle, familiar enough elsewhere throughout Ireland, had still the fascination of novelty in the eyes of Muirisc. The villagers could not keep their gaze from those gaunt, deserted walls. Some of the evicted people--those who were too old or too young to get off to America and yet too hardy to die--still remained in the neighborhood, sleeping in the ditches and subsisting upon the poor charity of the cottagers roundabout. The sight of their skulking, half-clad forms and hunger-pinched faces filled Muirisc with wrathful humiliation.