Chapter I

Mr. Phineas Phlynn, J. P., was a few years ago the agent upon the Irish estates of that erratic and eccentric, but excitable and energetic nobleman, Lord Oglemore. If Mr. Phlynn no longer performs the onerous functions of that office, it is because he has taken to a far-off and less humid sphere his various and variegated vices, and has probably by his importation into a remarkably torrid zone added another to the abundant torments of Pandemonium. In 1879, however, Mr. Phlynn, much to his own satisfaction, but a great deal more to the misery of his neighbors, was still in the flesh. Mr. Phlynn was by no means a happy man. His commission for collecting the rents of his absentee master was only a paltry shilling in the pound, and as Lord Oglemore’s landed property amounted to but a few thousand acres, and Mr. Phlynn’s habits included an addiction to French wines and Irish whiskey, a decided inclination to woo Dame Fortune by speculations on the turf and ventures at the roulette table, and an amorous disposition which plunged him into frequent financial scrapes, he felt that he must wring a bigger percentage out of his employer and increase his emoluments.

But how was it to be done?

He couldn’t raise the rents. They were so high already that the tenantry had some difficulty in reaching them, and were beginning to indulge in mutinous murmurs about abatements and reductions and re-adjustments, and the other pestilential, communistic, and diabolical ideas of the Land League. Phineas had been complaining for months to his noble master about the danger and difficulties of his post, surrounded, as he described himself, by hosts of murderous assassins who thirsted for his gore and wanted to perforate his magisterial hide with surreptitious bullets; and Phineas had strongly hinted that his accumulated risks deserved a commensurate reward in the shape of an additional income. But the only consolation Lord Oglemore vouchsafed was an assurance to Mr. Phlynn that if those “demmed Irish rascals” should make his carcass a repository for any appreciable quantity of lead, the beggars should have their rents raised fifty per cent. all around. This didn’t console Phineas worth a cent, for he felt that if he were laid to rest with his fathers with a few pounds of scrap iron in his manly bosom, he couldn’t enjoy the extra commission on the fifty per cent. rise in any exuberant degree. Besides, the levity of his lordship’s remarks induced the agent to guess that that rather wide-awake peer doubted his dismal forebodings. So Phineas resolved that he would bring matters to a crisis. There should be an outrage--a sanguinary, blood-curdling outrage, that would prove to the unbelieving Oglemore that his agent carried his life in his hand, and was certainly entitled to at least eighteen pence in each pound of the revenue he gathered in perpetual peril.