The
prevailing type of landlord has been their enemy and oppressor. The
priest has been friend, counsellor, sympathizer, helper, as well as
clergyman, and so he is _soggarth aroon_.
The storm continues at intervals. I get one clear, cold bit of fair
weather to climb to the top of Doune hill, where the Ulster kings used
to be crowned, a sugar-loaf shaped hill with the top broken off, rising
in isolated grandeur up high enough to give one a breather to get to the
top.
The weather returned to its normal condition of storm, and I was shut up
again. I became a little homesick, had the priest to tea, and enjoyed
his conversation very much, but he had to go off in the storm on a sick
call. A priest in these mountains has not the easiest kind of life in
the world.
Illusions took possession of my brain. I fancied myself a great queen,
to say the least of it. A whisper got among the hills that a great
American lady with unlimited power had come seeking the welfare of the
country, and so any amount of deputations wafted on me. I will give a
few specimens.
Two men to see my lady in reference to a small still that had been
misfortunately found on the place of an old man upward of eighty. He was
fined L12, and would my lady do anything?
Two women under sentence of eviction, my lady (I saw the place of one of
these, the roof was on the floor, and a little shelter was in one corner
like the lair of a wild beast, and here she kept possession in spite of
the dreadful Captain Dopping; the agent). Would my lady send out their
two daughters to America and place them in decent places?
And here was old Roseen, old and miserable, without chick or child, or
drop's blood belonging to her in the wide world, and would my lady
remember her?
Here's the crature of a widow from the mountain with four small
children, and no man body to help her with the place, and not a four-
footed beast on it belonging to her; all went in the scarcity; would my
lady look to her a little, sure she was the neediest of all?
And here was the poor cripple boy that his reverence was so good to,
&c., &c., &c., in endless file.
Nothing kept this over-dose of "my lady" from going to my head like
Innishowen poteen, but the slenderness of my purse. Determined at last,
warned by my fast-collapsing _portmonnaie_, to refuse to see any
more deputations and keep ben-the-house strictly. A cry arose that
Captain Dopping and his body-guard, on evictions bent, were coming up
the hill.
