the first spadeful from the wild mountain side; an' twelve acres are good labour land, an' fifteen drained an' good grazin'. I have been payin' rint twinty years, an' am still, thank God, able to take my own part iv any day's work—plough, spade, or flail." "Have you got a lease?" said I. "No, indeed, nor a schrape of a pin; nor I never axed it. Have I not my _tinnant-rite_?" At any moment the labours of poor Con might have been rendered of no benefit to him. He held the wretched hovel and the ground he tilled merely by the permission of the landlord, who could have desolated all by the common process of eviction; and Con would then have been driven to new exertions or to the workhouse. The rugged ballad of "Patrick Fitzpatrick's Farewell," presents a case more common than that of Con McNale:— "Those three long years I've labour'd hard as any on Erin's isle, And still was scarcely able my family to keep; My tender wife and children three, under the lash of misery, Unknown to friends and neighbours, I've often seen to weep. Sad grief it seized her tender heart, when forced her only cow to part, And canted[94] was before her face, the poor-rates for to pay; Cut down in all her youthful bloom, she's gone into her silent tomb; Forlorn I will mourn her loss when in America." In the same ballad we have an expression of the comparative paradise the Irish expect to find—and do find, by the way—in that land which excites so much the pity of the philanthropic aristocracy:— "Let Erin's sons and daughters fair now for the promised land prepare, America, that beauteous soil, will soon your toil repay; _Employment, it is plenty there, on beef and mutton you can fare, From five to six dollars is your wages every day_. Now see what money has come o'er these three years from Columbia's shore; But for it numbers now were laid all in their silent clay; California's golden mines, my boys, are open now to crown our joys, So all our hardships we'll dispute when in America." As an illustration of the manner in which eviction is sometimes effected by heartless landlords in Ireland, and the treatment which the lowly of Great Britain generally receive from those who become their masters, we may quote "Two Scenes in the Life of John Bodger," from "Dickens's Household Words." The characters in this sketch are English; but the incidents are such as frequently occur in Ireland:—