CHAPTER IV.
NATHANIEL KINGSNORTH VISITS IRELAND While the incidents of the foregoing chapters were taking place, the gentleman whose ownership shaped the destinies of many of the agitators of St.Kernan's Hill, was confronting almost as difficult a problem as O'Connell was facing on the mount.
Whilst O'Connell was pleading for the right of Ireland to govern herself, Mr.Nathaniel Kingsnorth was endeavouring to understand how to manage so unwieldy and so troublesome an estate.
The death of his father placed a somewhat extensive--and so far entirely unprofitable--portion of the village in his care.

His late father had complained all his life of the depreciation of values; the growing reluctance to pay rents; and the general dying-out of the worth of an estate that had passed into the hands of a Kingsnorth many generations before in the ordinary course of business, for notes that had not been taken up, and mortgages that had been foreclosed.
It was the open boast of the old gentleman that he had never seen the village, and it was one of his dying gratifications that he would never have to.
He had all the racial antipathy of a certain type of Englishmen to anything IRISH.

The word itself was unpleasant to his ears.

He never heard it without a shudder, and his intimates, at his request, refrained from using it in his presence.

The word represented to him all that was unsavoury, unpatriotic and unprincipled.
One phrase of his, in speaking of Ireland at a banquet, achieved the dignity of being printed in all the great London daily papers and was followed by a splenetic attack in the "Irish Nation." Both incidents pleased the old gentleman beyond measure.