Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1878 edition. Excerpt: ... III. Bailyporeen, Friday, December 28. If ever there was a suspicion that the unfortunates paraded at the trial in the Court of Queen's Bench were not fair specimens of "the rich, thriving, well-to-do fellows," the Buckley tenantry were described to be, one may hope that this investigation will once for all scatter it to the winds. I have already visited at haphazard better than one hundred and thirty of the four hundred and odd holdings affected by the valuation without stumbling upon more than three homes of average country comfort, and two of the three were enriched by the Land Company's expenditure. In fully halt the rest there was a bitter struggle for such necessaries of life as the inmates of poorhouses and prisons enjoy in abundance, and in none was there the smallest savour of the little comforts that make a life of sleepless industry endurable. I feel the terrible weight of the deduction from these words, but I cannot help it. In half a dozen human styes I have said--"This is surely the worst," until some other tottering heap of mud and wretchedness, some other ragged widow shivering with ague, some group of children ankle deep in mud ravening a platter of coarse stirabout turned up to admonish me I had spoken too soon. Thirty times, in varying phrase and in portions of the estate far apart, a peasant has said of his own acres of stony heath or bog--" This is the most starved bit of ground on the property;" and as often some deeper depth has been revealed, until I have to jog my memory for the few spots to which nature has been kind, or the much more numerous ones in which human toil has got the better of nature. It is irksome, if it were not vitally necessary, to go through this dreary catalogue of wretchednesses one by one....