Meanwhile the applicants for conacre holdings were flocking in more numerously than ever, but their biddings were getting lower instead of rising. Both they and the middleman saw the hundred acres or so lying idle and unprofitable, and they knew that it could not be for long. Either the middleman must lay it down again in grass or other crops, with the certainty of another such visitation and the risk of a worse one, or he must dispose of it in conacre, to his present indemnity from new losses, and his own personal protection. But so large an addition to the land into the market, under such unfavourable circumstances, was evidently calculated to depress the price of the whole. To assist this measure, and to make its effect more sure, the redoubted Terry Alt had caused it to be notified, that if any tenant dared to give a higher conacre rent than the maximum ascertained by his tariff, a new grave should yawn for him in the centre of his tenement, and not yawn vainly, nor very long. Amid so much to condemn and execrate, it is satisfactory to be able to commend Terry Alt for one thing-the moderation of his tariff. Six guineas for the conacre he allowed landlords to ask and their occupiers to give.

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66

In the course of the same ride, the gentleman of whom we have already spoken, entered an extensive district of the county Roscommon. An assemblage of cabins, called a village, lay close to his track, and on the hill above it, where many acres had been lately turned up, he perceived a number of men at work. Suspecting the cause, and halting at the nearest point of the village before-mentioned, he inquired of some peasants, who had come out to see him pass, whose land that was on the hill? On hearing the name, he at once knew it to be that of a proprietor recently visited by the Terry Alts. "What are those men doing "there?" was his next inquiry." Digging their conacres, y'ere honor."-" Oh! Mr. has been setting them "fresh conacre land, I suppose; it is very kind of him."Sure, y'ere honor, there's no thanks for him an' he did; "it's little he cares for the poor tinnants he has." This was strictly true.-" Has Terry Alt been among you, boys?" "Ah! thin, y'ere honor, we hard them who was talkin' "about him being in those parts.”—“ What sort of a man "is he?"-" Sure, y'ere honor, we never see him at all; "we're poor boys that does keep quiet and peaceable in "the cabins; it is'nt for the likes o' us to be goin' abroad "o' nights, or to be afther seein' Terry Alt, or to be spakin' "to him, God preserve us!"-" The rascal must do a great "deal of harm, this Terry Alt, destroying people's pro"perties in this shameful way."-" Musha, your honor, we "don't know nothin', maybe he does ;" and unconscious, perhaps, of the bearing of the action, they turned their eyes, as if mechanically, towards the fresh-turned field on the hill, and the men upon it, digging at the new potatoepatches they had got from Mr. for the old price of six guineas the conacre. Our friend rode home musing deeply over the scenes he had witnessed.

to hear of it. The very next morning he won over every one of the unhappy men enrolled by the Ribbonmen's emissary to come forward publicly in the Catholic parishchurch, and renounce the horrid oaths they had taken, and the society of crime into which they had been seduced. In proof of their sincerity they even undertook to join with their fellows in watching the district by night and by day, and in repelling the strangers, should they come again, by force, if necessary. Suffice it to say, Ribbonism was never again seen in that quarter.

Sir George Savile, foremost in the cause of Catholic emancipation in England, was one of the best among the few good Irish landlords of the last century. It was a shocking century for poor Ireland. The "Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland," published in 1777, by way of prelude to the following anecdote, tells us that at that time the Irish metropolis was perhaps "the only part of "the kingdom where the rights of human nature seemed in "the least attended to." Sir George had an estate in Ulster, which he visited a few years before that book was written, for the sake of informing himself about its local circumstances. All the leases were at that moment expired, which was a favourable opportunity for the good he meant to do. The tenants were, for the most part, groaning under terrible oppressions. A new middleman held the estates in large tracts immediately from him, and parcelled out these again among numerous cottiers at exorbitant rackrents. Sir George Savile resolved to emancipate the latter. He announced to them that each cottier was henceforth to hold immediately of him, and that he was ready to receive their tenders. To his surprise, they heard the announcement with gloom and dejection of mind, not with joy and gladness, as he had expected. They were wholly unused to acts of mercy, and, not knowing him personally, they fancied that, like the middleman of whom they had hitherto held their little farms, he was prepared to raise their rents to the uttermost. It was some time before they would tender at all, and when they did, they offered him what they had paid the middlemen, or undertakers as they were then called. To their amazement Sir George instantly remitted about half of that amount, and on those reduced terms renewed the leases of the deserving tenants. At the same time, by thus getting rid of the exacting middlemen, his own income was doubled. What adds to the grace and good desert of this benefaction, a single undertaker had offered him, upon as good security as the Bank of Eng"land, even more than he would accept from his tenants!" Sir George Savile is long since in his grave, whither his works have followed him. Fortunately there are some living who emulate those good works. Every landlord is not extortionate and unjust; every magistrate is not like the Wexford one, who, before the commutation of tithes, used to play into the hands of his brother justice, a parson like himself, and sacrifice the poor tithe-payers' rights to his own and his neighbour's cupidity. We must explain our meaning at the risk of a tiresome digression. About five years ago, when tithes were yet payable, they were recovered by summary process at petty sessions. man was supposed to have a fair hearing before the justices: and perhaps he had it, when the justices were not parsons too, or lay impropriators of tithe. In the case before us, however, there was an express compact between the two parson-justices to exchange tithe decrees whenever wanted. If it was parson A's tithe that was in question, he would ride over to parson B's house to breakfast; if it was parson B-'s, then he would ride over and breakfast with parson A. Whichever it was, the window of the room where the two justices were at breakfast would be thrown Moreover at no time did Terry Alt, any more than Cap- open, while the tithe-proctor, who had issued the process, tain Rock, or John Doe, or Richard Roe, or any other re- and the tithe-payers against whom it was issued, stood outformer of his vicinage, penetrate into the estates of just and side. The demands were most exorbitant: six acres were merciful landlords, no matter where situate. We know that often made into ten for the sake of the assessment; but good landlords and good agents always succeeded in driving how was the poor unlettered peasant to set it right? out the pestilence whenever it threatened such an inroad." Patrick Murphy!" the tithe-proctor would begin.There is a remarkable instance of this in our own recollec-" Here," answers Paddy. "The claim against you is tion. Ribbonmen some years ago made their way into one "£1 10s. 9d." Decreed," shout the justice and host, portion of an immense estate in Connaught, before the agent (a most excellent and humane one he was) could get

Terry Alt's reign is now a matter of history. As we have said, it expired within two years or so of its commencement. The grievance which was the throne of that malignant despot having crumbled away, the despot toppled down into chaos, and disappeared. All our inquiries into the conacre system as it is, have been met with the assurance that six guineas is now considered a very high rent indeed, at least in Connaught. Thus we may compliment the unhappy ruffians who set afoot those combinations upon more than one virtue besides that of moderation. They have approved their scrupulous fidelity to their engagement, and the cessation of the one grievance has indeed been the signal for the discontinuance of the other.

*"A Philosophical Survey," &c., p. 316.

The poor

in Heaven!

Terry Alt."

If there "this nation

Note on 46 Although the greater part of the above paper is generally applicable in Ireland, it is only in the west that conacre and yearly holdings, or leases, are held, by the same tenant. Elsewhere the prevailing system is to let some of the land to a few substantial farmers on long leases at moderate rents, and to parcel out the greater part of the rest among the poor, on conacre at very high rents. These indeed are so calculated as to leave a surplus to the tenant of less than a supply of food for the current year. In the county of Longford this system obtains pretty generally. A peasant told us that after he had tilled his conacre, pinched and squeezed his other resources, and paid the landlord his rent, be found that the rest of the crop, out of which he had to provide for his daily food and that of his family, had cost him as much as if he had purchased it in the market! so evenly balanced were the yearly value and the yearly rent! Last spring a Longford 'squire appeared before the Longford Election Committee, and contested the qualification of a tenant of his to vote. He brought surveyors who had valued the holding, which was let at £24 a year, but which they swore was worth only £23 12s., leaving the unhappy peasant 8s. in arrear, after having paid over to his landlord the whole year's value of the land. The landlord did not seem to be aware that, in disqualifying his tenant as a voter, he was publishing his own infamy as an oppressor of the poor.

without moving from the breakfast-table. The same farce return of capital. But although hired time and labour cannot would be gone through with the rest, after which the justice be applied beneficially to such cultivation, the owner's own andguest, thanking the justice and entertainer, would mount time and labour may. He is working for no higher returns at his horse and return home! We repeat it there are, first from his land than a bare living. But in the course of and there always have been, gentlemen in Ireland of a very generations, fertility and value are produced; a better living, different fashion from this. There are, and there have and even very improved processes of husbandry, are attained. Furrow draining, stall feeding all summer, liquid manures, are been, good magistrates and good landlords. were not," says the author we have cited, universal in the husbandry of the small farms of Flanders, "would soon cease to exist as a people." Lombardy, and Switzerland. Our most improving districts under large farms are but beginning to adopt them. Dairy But, on the other hand, though Terry Alt reigned para-husbandry even, and the manufacture of the largest cheeses, mount in Thomond and part of Connaught, though Captain by the co-operation of many small farmers-the mutual Rock was formidable in Munster, and though wherever assurance of property against fire and hailstorms, by the commisery has existed, there have always been lawless men to bination of small farmers-the most scientific and expensive form agrarian combinations of some kind or other, it is not of all agricultural operations in modern times, the manufacture every peasant that has shared in their misdeeds. Thousands of beet-root sugar,-the supply of the European markets with and thousands of poor men, ay, and of persecuted and flax and hemp, by the husbandry of small farmers,-the starving ones, were to be found in those districts of outrage abundance of legumes, fruits, poultry, in the usual diet even of and crime, who steadfastly withstood the temptation, and to the lowest classes abroad, and the total want of such variety at the end refused to join the accursed confederates. We say the tables even of our middle classes, and this variety and accursed for the excommunications of the Church did abundance essentially connected with the husbandry of small but promulgate upon Irish soil a sentence already registered of a country by small proprietor farmers, which must make the farmers, all these are features in the system of the occupation inquirer pause before he admits the dogma of our land doctors at home, that large farms worked by hired labour and great capital can alone bring out the greatest productiveness of the soil, and furnish the greatest supply of the necessaries and conveniences of life to the inhabitants of a country. One common error in the usual comparison of the large farm and small farm systems-la grande and la petite culture-is to reckon as increased production from the soil the increased quantity of grain or other products, sent to market by the large farmer from the same extent of land. A farm for instance of two hundred arable acres in the hands of a single farmer, may send to the market town a larger quantity of grain than if the land were occupied by ten or fiften farmers with their families. But this, if correct to all the extent assumed by agricultural writers, is not increased production from the soil. It is in political economy only a different distribution of perhaps the same, or even a less amount of produce-it affects only the different proportions of a population living in the country by agriculture, or living in the towns by manufacturing industry. The quantity of food of all kinds raised from the soil is not necessarily greater, because a greater proportion of it is consumed by the town populations, and a smaller by the country populations. It may even be a question in social economy, whether the well-being of a people is promoted by that kind of artificial or forced system, which sacrifices the comfort, and condition, or numbers of the agricultural labouring class of a country, to the prosperity and increase of its town or manufacturing populations. It may be a question whether the body engaged in agriculture should be deprived of its middle classes, its small farmers, its yeomanry, by the unnatural and forced value given to land, by the combined operations of corn laws and of the exclusive political privileges attached to the possession of landed property. The true conthe grande and petite culture, appears to be, that the capital and skill of large farmers attain all over a country no augmentation of the products from soil and climate, which is not equally attainable by the labour, skill, and conjoined means of an intelligent body of small farmers. The traveller who looks without prejudice or preconceived opinion at the state of crops on the Continent, wherever the small farming and small proprietary system is predominant, at the abundance and variety of food afforded by it to the rest of the population, and at the way of living, the cheapness, the physical comforts in diet and lodging of the working classes, and the whole social effect of the occupancy of land in small farms, will come to this conclusion-viz., that the large farm money-rent system, which is almost entirely confined to Britain, is a kind of political establishment, the growth of artificial arrangements of society, and fostered by the classes it supports; but is in reality not essential to good husbandry, or to the utmost wellbeing of its inhabitants. Food raised from our own soil will become more abundant, and in greater variety, by the increase of the number of its producers. This is the natural law of all production.-Laing's Notes of a Traveller.

LARGE AND SMALL FARMS.-If we listen to the large farmer, the scientific agriculturist, the political economist, good farming must perish with large farms; the very idea that good farming can exist, unless on large farms cultivated with great capital they hold to be absurd. Draining, manuring, economical arrangement, cleaning the land, regular rotations, valuable stock and implements, all belong exclusively to large farms, worked by large capitals, and by hired labour. This reads very well; but if we raise our eyes from their books to their fields, and coolly compare what we see in the best districts farmed in small farms, we see, and there is no blink-clusion in political economy on the relative productiveness of ing the fact, better crops on the ground in Flanders, East Friesland, Holstein, in short on the whole line of the arable land of equal quality of the Continent, from the Sound to Calais, than we see on the line of British coast opposite to this line, and in the same latitudes, from the Firth of Forth all round to Dover. Minute labour on small portions of arable ground give evidently, in equal soils and climate, a superior productiveness, where these small portions belong in property, as in Flanders, Holland, Friesland, and Ditmarsh in Holstein, to the farmer. It is not pretended by our agricultural writers, that our large farmers even in Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, or the Lothians, approach to the garden-like cultivation, attention to manures, drainage, and clean state of the land, or in productiveness from a small space of soil not originally rich, which distinguish the small farmers of Flanders and their system. In the best farmed parish in Scotland or England, more land is wasted in the corners and borders of the fields of large farms, in the roads through them, unnecessarily wide because they are bad, and bad because they are wide, in neglected commons, waste spots, useless belts and clumps of sorry trees, and such unproductive areas, as would maintain the poor of the parish, if they were all laid together and cultivated. But large capital applied to farming is of course only applied to the very best of the soils of a country. It cannot touch the small unproductive spots which require more time and labour to fertilize them, than is consistent with a quick

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The thought occurred to me as I sat down in another room, before a girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell, and nearly so of taste; before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and hope, and power of goodness and affection inclosed within her delicate frame, and but one outward sense-the sense of touch. There she was, before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall beckoning to some good man for help, that an immortal soul might be awakened.

Long before I looked upon her, the help had come. Her face was radiant with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands, was bound about a head whose intellectual capacity and development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and its broad open brow; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and simplicity; the work she had knitted, lay beside her; her writing-book was on the desk she leaned upon.-From the mournful ruin of such bereavement, there had slowly risen up this gentle, tender, guileless, grateful hearted being.

LAURA, THE DEAF, DUMB, | as blind men and women are, what secrets would come AND BLIND GIRL. out, and what a worker of hypocrisy this sight, the loss of Our readers have no doubt which we so much pity, would appear to be! all heard of various benevolent institutions and benevolent efforts for communicating knowledge and mental culture to those unfortunate persons who are deprived of one or more of their senses. They know, we dare say, that blind people have been taught to read and write, and to study geography on maps made expressly for their tutored fingers. They must have heard also of the success which has attended the endeavour to make dumb people speak and deaf people comprehend what is so spoken by the dumb. But we have before us, in the new work on America of Mr. Dickens, one of the most interesting accounts we have ever met with of the training up of a girl, deaf, dumb, blind, without either taste or smell, and possessing only the one sense of touch. We are sure our readers will be extremely gratified at our giving them entire this most touching narrative. The institution in which she has been educated is "The Perkins “Institution and Massachussetts Asylum for the Blind at "Boston." The following are Mr. Dickens' own words :I went to see this place one very fine winter morning. The children were at their daily tasks in different rooms, except a few who were already dismissed and were at play. Good order, cleanliness, and comfort, pervaded every corner of the building. The various classes who were gathered round their teachers, answered the questions put to them with readiness and intelligence, and in a spirit of cheerful contest for precedence which pleased me very much. Those who were at play, were gleesome and noisy as other children. More spiritual and affectionate friendships appeared to exist among them, than would be found among other young persons suffering under no deprivation; but this I expected and was prepared to find. It is a part of the great scheme of Heaven's merciful considera

tion for the afflicted.

In a portion of the building, set apart for that purpose, are workshops for blind persons whose education is finished, and who have acquired a trade, but who cannot pursue it in an ordinary manufactory because of their deprivation. Several people were at work here; making brushes, mattresses, and so forth; and the cheerfulness, industry, and good order discernible in every other part of the building, extended to this department also.

On the ringing of a bell, the pupils all repaired, without any guide or leader, to a spacious music-hall, where they took their seats in an orchestra erected for that purpose, and listened with manifest delight to a voluntary on the organ, played by one of themselves. At its conclusion, the performer, a boy of nineteen or twenty, gave place to a girl; and to her accompaniment they all sang a hymn, and afterwards a sort of chorus. It was very sad to look upon and hear them, happy though their condition unquestionably was; and I saw that one blind girl, who (being for the time deprived of the use of her limbs, by illness) sat close beside me with her face towards them, wept silently the while she listened.

It is strange to watch the faces of the blind, and see how free they are from all concealment of what is passing in their thoughts; observing which, a man with eyes may blush to contemplate the mask he wears. Allowing for one shade of anxious expression which is never absent from their countenances, and the like of which we may readily detect in our own faces if we try to feel our way in the dark, every idea, as it rises within them, is expressed with the lightning's speed, and nature's truth. If the company at a rout, or drawing-room at court, could only for one time be as unconscious of the eyes upon them

Like other inmates of that house, she had a green ribbon bound round her eyelids. A doll she had dressed lay near upon the ground. I took it up, and saw that she had made a green fillet such as she wore herself, and fastened it about its mimic eyes.

She was seated in a little enclosure, made by schooldesks and forms, writing her daily journal. But soon finishing this pursuit, she engaged in an animated communication with a teacher who sat beside her. This was a favourite mistress with the poor people. If she could see the face of her fair instructress, she would not love her less, I am sure.

I have extracted a few disjointed fragments of her history, from an account, written by that one man who has made her what she is. It is a very beautiful and touching narrative; and I wish I could present it entire.

Her name is Laura Bridgman. "She was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the twenty-first of December, 1829. She is described as having been a very sprightly and pretty infant, with bright blue eyes. She was, however, so puny and feeble until after she was a year and a half old, that her parents hardly hoped to rear her. She was subject to severe fits, which seemed to rack her frame almost beyond her power of endurance; and life was held by the feeblest tenure: but when a year and a half old, she seemed to rally; the dangerous symptoms subsided; and at twenty months old she was perfectly well.

"Then her mental powers, hitherto stinted in their growth, rapidly developed themselves; and during the four months of health which she enjoyed, she appears (making due allowance for a fond mother's account) to have displayed a considerable degree of intelligence.

"But suddenly she sickened again; her disease raged with great violence during five weeks, when her eyes and ears were inflamed, suppurated, and their contents were discharged. But though sight and hearing were gone for ever, the poor child's sufferings were not ended. The fever raged during seven weeks; for five months she was kept in bed in a darkened room; it was a year before she could walk unsupported, and two years before she could sit up all day. It was now observed that her sense of smell was almost entirely destroyed; and, consequently, that her taste was much blunted.

"It was not until four years of age that the poor child's bodily health seemed restored, and she was able to enter upon her apprenticeship of life and the world.

"But what a situation was hers! The darkness and the silence of the tomb were around her: no mother's smile called forth her answering smile, no father's voice taught her to imitate his sounds-they, brothers and sisters, were but forms of matter which resisted her touch, but which differed not from the furniture of the house,