'Which of you here,' would he say, 'can come forward and say he was ever evicted ?' Now as the term was one of which none had the very vaguest conception--it might, for aught they knew, have been an operation in surgery--the appeal was an overwhelming success.

'Sorra doubt of it, but ould Peter's right, and there's worse places to live in, and worse landlords to live under, than the lord.' Not but it taxed Gill's skill and cleverness to maintain this quarantine against the outer world; and he often felt like Prince Metternich in a like strait--that it would only be a question of time, and, in the long run, the newspaper fellows must win.
From what has been said, therefore, it may be imagined that Kilgobbin was not a model estate, nor Peter Gill exactly the sort of witness from which a select committee would have extracted any valuable suggestions for the construction of a land-code.
Anything short of Kate Kearney's fine temper and genial disposition would have broken down by daily dealing with this cross-grained, wrong-headed, and obstinate old fellow, whose ideas of management all centred in craft and subtlety--outwitting this man, forestalling that--doing everything by halves, so that no boon came unassociated with some contingency or other by which he secured to himself unlimited power and uncontrolled tyranny.
As Gill was in perfect possession of her father's confidence, to oppose him in anything was a task of no mean difficulty; and the mere thought that the old fellow should feel offended and throw up his charge--a threat he had more than once half hinted--was a terror Kilgobbin could not have faced.
Nor was this her only care.

There was Dick continually dunning her for remittances, and importuning her for means to supply his extravagances.

'I suspected how it would be,' wrote he once, 'with a lady paymaster.

And when my father told me I was to look to you for my allowance, I accepted the information as a heavy percentage taken off my beggarly income.