[Sidenote: A visit to the Lords.]
It is not often that a rational man takes the trouble of paying a visit
to the House of Lords. But that assembly was certainly worth a visit on
May 1st. When the fight in Woodford, County Galway, was at its height,
and everybody was repeating the name of Lord Clanricarde, people began
to ask if there were ever such a person, or if he were not merely the
creation of some morbid imagination--desirous of conjuring up a human
bogey for the purpose of demonstrating the iniquities of Irish
landlordism. The story on the estate which he owned, and whose destinies
he controlled, was that, on one occasion, a strange spectral figure had
been seen following the coffin of the old Clanricarde to the tomb of his
fathers; that the figure had disappeared as suddenly and as noiselessly
as it had come; that it had not reappeared even on the solemn occasion
when again the historic and century-old vaults of the family graveyard
had opened to receive the late lord's wife and the existing lord's
mother. Writing his missives from afar--invisible, unapproachable,
unknown--or known, rather, only by harsh refusal--by dogged, obdurate
rejection of all terms--save the full pound of flesh--not even rendered
human by passionate and eloquent outburst of remonstrance, but
represented by thin, brief, business-like and curt notes as of a very
crusty solicitor--such Lord Clanricarde appeared to the imaginations of
the people of the district of which he was almost the supreme master.
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