In many books we read about farmers life in Ireland and it most interesting to see how farmers and other labourers lived in olden times a hundred or two hundred years ago. The boys and girls of to day often complain of their sufferings and the are really nothing when the read of the hardships of the years gone by which the people had to endure. Those farms were very small in Ireland more than half of them were under ten acres so that few of them were large enough to support the farmer and his family.
The rents were high. To provide the rents the people had to sell all the could, and his family lived on potatoes and salt and sour milk and buttermilk. if he were unable to pay the rent he was thrown out on the roadside and his little straw cabin burned on him.