The Letters Of
The Letters Of "Norah" On Her Tour Through Ireland By Margaret Dixon Mcdougall - Page 83 of 208 - First - Home

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Passed Another House, A Widow's, Who Has Been Evicted.

The family had been put out and the official went to get some water to quench the fire; all the little household belongings were scattered about.

Putting out the fire and fastening up the door were the last acts of the eviction. While the official's back was turned, the widow slipped in again, and was fastened up in the house, the children being outside. Her sons are a little silly. The children camp outside and she holds the garrison inside. She thinks the Land Bill or the Land League, or something miraculous will turn up to help her if she keeps possession for a while. Fear that she has done wrong and laid herself open to some greater punishment, and excitement have blanched her face. In the dim evening she sits at the window inside; the children have a gipsy fire and sit under the window outside. When the gloaming has passed and dark night settled down, the police come over from the barracks to see if any of the children have gone in beside the mother. This would be taking forcible possession, and some other process of law would be possible. To make assurance sure, the policeman puts his head close to the window, sees the widow's white face and wild eyes sitting in the dark alone, and the children sitting under the window, and then the party, with something like tears in their eyes, something very like pity in their hearts, go back to the barracks.

I wonder how these things will end. It is not stubbornness, but helplessness and despair that makes them cling so to their homes, combined with an utter dread of the disgrace and separation involved in going to the workhouse. I listened to one tale after another of harassment, misery and thoughtless oppression in Kiltyclogher till my heart was sick, and I felt one desire - to run away that I might hear no more. I applied the traditional grain of salt to what I heard, but could not manage to add it to what I saw.

Mr. Tottenham rules part of Kiltyclogher. This man has a very evil name among the tenants. Reclamation of land by very poor people is a very serious matter. Not only do the bogs require drains twenty-one feet apart and three deep (I have seen the people in the act of making such drains again and again); not only do the surface stones require to be gathered off, but great stones and immense boulders that obstruct the formation of the drains, have to be removed, and as they have no powder for blasting, they take the primitive method of kindling great fires over the rock and splitting it up that way, so that their husbandry is farming under difficulties. As the Fermanagh farmer said, they put their lives into it.

In the long ago the landlords of Ireland, though extravagant, were not, as a class, unkindly, but their waste involved the land, and their absenteeism prevented any thoughts for the benefit of the country ever occurring to them.

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