Note (return) — Chapter IX

DUBLIN, Thursday, March 1.—This has been a crowded day. I left Portumna very early on a car with Mr. Tener, intending to visit the scene of his latest collision with the “National” government of Ireland, on my way to Loughrea. It was a bright spring morning, more like April in Italy than like March in America, and the country is full of natural beauty. We made our first halt at the derelict house of Martin Kenny, one of the “victims” of the famous “Woodford evictions,” so called, as I have said, because Woodford is the nearest town.13 The eviction here took place October 21st, 1887. The house has been dismantled by the neighbours since that time, each man carrying off a door, or a shutter, or whatever best suited him. One of the constables who followed us as Mr. Tener’s body-guard had been present at the eviction. He came into the house with us, and very graphically described the performance. The house was still full of heavy stones taken into it, partly to block the entrances, and partly as ammunition; and trunks of trees used as chevaux defrise still protruded through the door and the window. These trees had been cut down by the garrison in the woodlands here and there all over the property. I asked if the law in Ireland punished depredations of this sort, and was informed that trees planted by tenants, if registered by them within a certain time, are the property of the tenants. This would astonish our landlords in America, where the tenant who sticks so much as a sunflower into his garden-patch makes a present of it to his landlord.14