Ireland Under Coercion - vol. 2 | Page 7

These were signals to the people of our approach, and gave quite the air of an invasion to our expedition. We passed the burned cottages of last year just before reaching Mr. Griffin's house at West Lettur. They were certainly not large cottages, and I saw but three of them. We found the Sheriff at West Lettur. The police and the soldiers drew a cordon around the place, within which no admittance was to be had except on business; and the myrmidons of the law going into the house with the agent held a final conference with the tenant, of which nothing came but a renewal of his previous offer. Then the work of eviction began. There was no attempt at a resistance, and but for the martial aspect of the forces, and an occasional blast of a horn from the hills, or the curious noises made from time to time by a small concourse of people, chiefly women, assembled on the slope of an adjoining tenancy, the proceedings were as dull as a parish meeting. What most struck me about the affair was the patience and good-nature of the officers. In the two hours and a half which we spent at West Lettur a New York Sheriff's deputies would have put fifty tenants with all their bags and baggage out of as many houses into the street. In fact it is very likely that at least that number of New York tenants were actually so ousted from their houses during this very time.
The evicted Mr. Griffin was a stout, stalwart man of middle age, comfortably dressed, with the air rather of a citizen than of a farmer, who took the whole thing most coolly, as did also his women-kind. All of them were well dressed, and they superintended the removal and piling up of their household goods as composedly as if they were simply moving out of one house into another. The house itself was a large comfortable house of the country, and it was amply furnished.
I commented on Griffin's indifference to the bailiff, a quiet, good-natured man.
"Oh, he's quite familiar," was the reply; "it's the third time he's been evicted! I believe's going to America."
"Oh! he will do very well," said a gentleman who had joined the expedition like myself to see the scene. "He is a shrewd chap, and not troubled by bashfulness. He sat on a Board of Guardians with a man I knew four years ago, and one day he read out his own name, 'James Griffin,' among a list of applicants for relief at Cahirciveen. The chairman looked up, and said, 'Surely that is not your name you are reading, is it?' 'It is, indeed,' replied Griffin, 'and I am as much in need of relief as any one!' Perhaps you'll be surprised to hear he didn't get it. This is a good holding he had, and he used to do pretty well with it--not in his mother's time only of the flush prices, but in his own. It was the going to Kilmainham that spoiled him."
"How did that spoil him?"
"Oh, it made a great man of him, being locked up. He was too well treated there. He got a liking for sherry and bitters, and he's never been able to make his dinner since without a nip of them. Mrs. Shee knows that well."
To make an eviction complete and legal here, everything belonging to the tenant, and every live creature must be taken out of the house. A cat may save a house as a cat may save a derelict ship. Then the Sheriff must "walk" over the whole holding. All this takes time. There was an unobtrusive search for arms too going on all the time. Three ramrods were found hidden in a straw-bed--two of which showed signs of recent use. But the guns had vanished. An officer told me that not long ago two revolvers were found in a corner of the thatch of a house; but the cartridges for them were only some time afterwards discovered neatly packed away in the top of a bedroom wall. It is not the ownership of these arms, it is the careful concealment of them which indicates sinister intent. One of the constables brought out three "Moonlighters' swords" found hidden away in the house. One of these Colonel Turner showed me. It was a reversal of the Scriptural injunction, being a ploughshare beaten into a weapon, and a very nasty weapon of offence, one end of it sharpened for an ugly thrust, the other fashioned into quite a fair grip. While I was examining this trophy there was a stir, and presently two of the gentlemen who had passed us on Mr. Shee's car came rather suddenly out of the house in company with