His elder brothers made up and settled upon him a sum of twenty thousand pounds.

He entered the Army, and being quartered for a time at Letterkenny, shot and fished all about Donegal.

He found the people here kindly and friendly, but in a deplorable state of ignorance and of destitution.

Their holdings under sundry small proprietors were entirely unimproved, and as their families increased, these holdings were cut up by themselves into even smaller strips under the system known as "rundale,"-- each son as he grew up taking off a slice of the paternal holding, putting up a hut with mud, and scratching the soil after his own rude fashion.

This custom, necessarily fatal to civilisation, doubtless came down from the traditional times when the lands of a sept were held in common by the sept, before the native chieftains had converted themselves into landlords, and defeated Sir John Davies's attempt to convert their tribal kinsmen into peasant proprietors.
Whatever its origin, it had reduced Gweedore, or "Tullaghobegly," fifty years ago to barbarism.