Ordinarily, an unfinished work is not to be judged, but knowing what we know about Trollope's writing patterns, it seems unlikely that any major revisions would have occurred in what he had already written. We do have forty-eight of the planned sixty chapters, with a short note by Harry Trollope to confirm what any experienced Trollope reader would suspect as to who married whom and who was to be hanged in the end. And as we follow the misfortunes of the Jones family members who occupied Morony Castle, we see the effects of a campaign of terror in a quiet green countryside. Outside agitators, surely from America, have come among the "generous, kindly, impulsive, and docile" country Irish folk, leading them to believe that one man is as good as another (nothing said about the women, of course), and that those who rent land don't really have to pay their full rent to the lord of the manor. Farmers in America don't pay rent to a landlord, they are told. Each man has his own (small) farm. If the lands of America were there to be taken from the Indians, why should not the Irish farmers take it from the greedy landlords? Mr. Jones's problems at Morony Castle begin when his sluice gates are opened, flooding eighty acres of good bottom land. His ten-year old son Florian, who happened to witness the event, is terrified into silence by his father's discontented renter who makes him swear not to tell, invoking the Catholic religion that the lad had innocently adopted as a bit of filial rebellion. After months of pressure and wheedling by his sisters, who guess correctly that he knows, young Florian finally names Pat Carroll as the culprit. On his way to the courthouse with his father to give testimony, he is shot through the head and killed by a double barrel rifle poked through a hole in a stone wall along the road. This reign of terror happened to occur in rural Ireland; it could have been the Taliban in Afghanistan, the mafia in Sicily, the mob in Chicago, or the Ku Klux Klan in the Jim Crow South. But here in County Galway the usual ingredients were to be found: inadequate law enforcement, young men with more testosterone than employment, and a fearful populace. Less violent but more widespread rebellion had already appeared in the disruption of a fox hunt. The author had learned fox hunting in Ireland, and many of the momentous events in his novels take place at fox hunts. On this occasion, whenever the hunters arrive at a gorse covert, they find the local farmers already there, having beaten the area so that no fox would have remained for the chase.