The cottages were rough cast and washed over with drab; they were
covered with roses that were in as rich bloom as if they were blooming
for gentry. Truly the tenants planted them, but a tenant who plants
roses is not living in a state of desperation as to the means of
existence. When he sent men to wash over the tenement houses, and the
good wives trembled for the roses. "The gardener shall come and arrange
them again and see that they are not harmed in the least," he said.
They tell me that this gentleman, being a trader with a commercial mind,
takes for his tenements the utmost they will bring. If so, when he
builds the houses, and keeps them in thorough repair, it is surely doing
what he will with his own. Others who do not build, who never repair,
surely raise the rent on what is, strictly and honestly speaking, not
their own.
There is a difference between this gentleman, whose tenants say, "He
will send his own gardener to fix up the roses again after the white, or
rather gray washing," and the lord in the West whose tenants say, "If he
saw a patch of flowers at the door, he would compel us to grub it up as
something beyond our station."
The agent on the Galgorm estate told me that during twenty-five years,
when he was in Lord Mount Cashel's land office, there was but one
eviction, and that man got four hundred pounds for his tenant right
before he left the yard.
