Ireland Under Coercion - vol. 2 | Page 7

a year or two ago, went through the
Bankruptcy Court, and the Hon. Rowland Winn, his uncle, the titular
owner of Glenbehy, is set down among the Irish landlords as owning
13,932 Irish acres at a rental of £1382.
After we passed the castle we began to hear the blowing of rude horns
from time to time on the distant hills. 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