Oh, Yes, He Said, We Patrol Every Night,
Although We Never See Anything Worse Than Ourselves.
Left Lough Mask, its castled ruins and modern mansion behind us, and
drove through the gates again.
I felt convinced that the people were not
filled with an unreasoning hate against Captain Boycott. They thought
they had reason, deep reason, and they scrupulously excepted Mrs.
Boycott from any censure bestowed on him.
Along the road we drove, until from an eminence we could see Lough Mask
in its beauty, with its bays and islands spread out beneath us. This
view gave us a part of the Lough where the water covers the stones. This
particular evening the water was as calm as a mirror and as blue as the
sky above it, and the trees on the hills and bays around it in their
greenness and leafiness, round-headed and massive, were all bathed in
sunlight. We came to fields a little more barren-looking, where bare
stone fences took the place of the rich hedgerows, turned up a road that
lay between these stony ramparts, and drove along for a little time.
I was wondering in my own mind about Captain Boycott. Did he, in his own
consciousness, think he was doing right in his system of fines? He knew
how small and miserable the wages were: he knew of the poor, comfortless
homes and the "smidrie o' wee duddy weans" that depended on the poor
pennies the father brought home; he knew that he came out well fed and
leisurely to find fault with a peasant who was working with a sense of
goneness about the stomach.
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