ONE MORE WOFUL STORY OF THE BUCKLEY ESTATE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 258, 12 April 1878, Page 3

ONE MORE WOFUL STORY OF THE BUCKLEY ESTATE.

As I returned from Mitchelstowrt lately, after completing some inquiries respecting a neighbouring estate, a starved-looking and halfnaked old woman, bare-footed, and shivering with age and pain, besought mo to sec her cabin in a remote marsh at Doolis, where we had not been able to penetrate the previous night. Another tenant, David Russell, of Doolis, who has also been served with an ejectment, volunteered to pilot me across the bogs. I followed into a shaking morass, across which there is a precarious avenue of stepping-stones, surrounded by filthy quagmire, stocked with snipe. In Ms anxiety to allow me to use the dry places, my pioneer went almost to the knees in water. He did not seem to think that anything remarkable had happened. " When Mr. Walker was here," he said, "ho would not believe the world that there was ever enough water here to wet his shoes." At last we came to the cabin. It may have been because it was the last I saw, but the impression of horror find sickness left upon my mind by the sight of it fills me with loathing even while I write. The unfortunate creature had built it herself of sods and stones, and thatched it with heath and rashes. The approaches to it were swimming ■with liquid manure and mud ; the odors in and around the place revolting. Heaps of stones and bits of timber were fastened against the walls here and there to prevent them from falling to pieces. Inside all was darkness. My companion took the door off its one hinge to give light. It was even more shocking to see than to imagine what was there ; not a gleam of fire on the hearth, neither dresser, table, nor bos : the window was stuffed with stones to keep out the storm ; a coarse platter of yellow stirabout, "without even salt, represented the whole food of the establishment, and an iron pot the whole furniture. There were stones for seats, a mound of stones for bedstead. I thought I perceived a heap of turnips inside the door ; I put down nry hand and found it was a pile of stones thrown against the wall as a rude buttress to support it. Within this desolate rookery Widow Coiulon spent, her Christmas night, having begged a meal of bread and tea from her neighbours as her Christmas dinner — not the pooi'cst scrap of meat even theu. Her holding is one nwampy field, upon which the rent has been raised from 2s. (id. to 255. She \n\t dowu a quarter of au acre of potatoes, aud, after giving 30s. for II cwt. of special manure, aud 10.s. lor labor, the potatoes were uot worth digging. Last year she laid down the whole field in oats, having paid 10s.. for the seed and (Is. for the horse that ploughed it ; the crop brought her j:l. She has neither cow, sheep, nor even hen. Of course she '• settled" from the beginning — that is to .say, she pledged her last decent clothes to pay the last half-year's rent, and is indebted to the charity of a neighbour for the little thin cloak she wears, and for a bed better protected than her own crazy shelling. As I drove away in the evening to Cahir, past Lord Lismore's ample domains, past the rich expanses of luxuriant grass and deep cornlands reddened for spring sowing, past orchards and barns and bursting farmyards, and the trim rows of model cottages which border the Lady Margaret Charteris' park- walls, it was hard to think I siill breathed the air of the same country which encloses all the barrenness aud blight, all the suffering and sorrow, I had left behind me around the Galtees. — Correspondent of Pilot.