My Visitors 141 



could come here in safety and learn something 

 about his business. That would not be more than 

 was due to me, and I should have readily consented, 

 feeling, as I did, that we ought, if we could, to 

 advance the usefulness of an expensive official 

 apparently inclined to get some little acquaintance 

 with the duties of his position. During his 

 presence on the place nothing was stolen. 



I have been visited also by many official experts, 

 including one placed very high in the Department, 

 high enough to personify its influence and 

 to commit its authority. Curious to know the 

 effect of his first lesson in my school, but un- 

 willing to compromise him by calling on him, I 

 went down to the smoke-room of the House of 

 Commons, met some of the Members in his 

 confidence, and set them talking of agriculture. 

 I cannot pretend to reproduce with verbal t accuracy 

 here everything which this expert had told them, 

 though they said he had told them much ; but I 

 can safely give the following description as their 

 own, though they could never have achieved it 

 without assistance from the Department. 



" Pat's little farm is the dirtiest I have ever 

 seen, even in Ireland. . . . Yes, the plot of 

 heather is there, right enough, but for all that, I 

 do not believe a word that ' Pat ' writes about it. 

 He has the best bit of land in Connaught (though 

 so ' dirty '), but the clever scoundrel has gone and 

 planted a plot of heath in the middle of it to make 



feople believe that the area around was reclaimed, 

 n buying the fee-simple under the Land Act, as 



