At last the man of soap bars and long dips had dismissed his easy-going agent and sent his son across, armed with plenary powers of eviction, ejectment, and all the multifarious legal weapons in the armory of landlordism. Young Peter felt fully equal to the task of reducing the entire Irish population to meek submission, and wasn’t going to be put down by a score or two beggarly Cork men, don’t you know. Peter was smart; Peter was more than smart, he was the most determined fellah of any fellah he knew. Why, he had been accustomed to deal with rascally workmen who were always wanting more wages, and he had once sacked fifty--fifty in a batch. The beggars were glad to send their wives to beg ’em back. He’d make these Irishmen sit up. He’d show ’em what was what. They had no old slow-coach of a Gleeson to deal with now. They had Peter Philipson--“no-nonsense Peter,” as they called him in the city.
The Manor House was fitted up for his temporary residence. He retained the old housekeeper and the cook and the coachman and a stable boy, only bringing from London with him his body-servant, one John Thomas Jones, a stolid cockney, who bade his relatives a sad adieu under the evident impression that he was about to face perils and catastrophes of the most alarming description among the cannibal Irish. Peter’s first proceeding was to present various letters of introduction to the neighboring landlords and the officers of the adjoining garrison; his next to extend to them an invitation to a soiree or party to be given as a kind of house-warming by him on the 20th of March, by which time he expected to be in a position to tell them that he had brought the recalcitrant occupiers of “his father’s ground” to their proper senses. These social duties performed, Mr. Philipson, Jr., despatched separate missives to each tenant, setting forth the amount of his arrears, including the incoming gale, and demanded a prompt settlement under penalty of immediate law proceedings. That task over, Peter rested upon his oars, purred contentedly to himself for a few days, wrote to his father that he had shaken the beggars up, and indicted a lengthy epistle to the _Limehouse Chronicle_ on the proper method of settling the Irish difficulty.