 Tom Kettle distributed pro-Boer leaflets during the early months of the South African Second Boer War, and protested against the Irish Literary Theatre production of Yeats' "The Countess Cathleen" in 1899 over its irreligious story of an unlikely kind-hearted aristocrat who sells her soul to save her tenants.Due to illness he interrupted his studies in 1900, his health always being fragile.He went abroad to renew his spirits by travelling on the continent, improving his German and French.