bbies
in search of his warders. Men who had been shot by moonlighters limped
into the box, and poor women in their blue-hooded cloaks told pitiful
tales of midnight horror. The sharp spy was there, who disclosed sinister
secrets from cities across the Atlantic, and the uncouth informer who
betrayed or invented the history of rude and ferocious plots hatched at
the country cross-roads (M144) or over the peat fire in desolate cabins in
western Ireland. Divisional commissioners with their ledgers of agrarian
offences, agents with bags full of figures and documents, landlords,
priests, prelates, magistrates, detectives, smart members of that famous
constabulary force which is the arm, eye, and ear of the Irish
government--all the characters of the Irish melodrama were crowded into the
corridors, and in their turn brought out upon the stage of this surprising
theatre.

The proceedings speedily settled down into the most wearisome drone that
was ever heard in a court of law. The object of the accusers was to show
the complicity of the accused with crime by tracing crime to the league,
and making every member of the league constructively liable for every act
of which the league was constructively guilty. Witnesses were produced in
a series that seemed interminable, to tell the story of five-and-twenty
outrages in Mayo, of as many in Cork, of forty-two in Galway, of
sixty-five in Kerry, one after another, and all with immeasurable detail.
Some of the witnesses spoke no English, and the English of others was
hardly more intelligible than Erse. Long extracts were read out from four
hundred and forty speeches. The counsel on one side produced a passage
that made against the speaker, and then the counsel on the other side
found and read some qualifying passage that made as strongly for him. The
three judges groaned. They had already, they said plaintively, ploughed
through the speeches in the solitude of their own rooms. Could they not be
taken as read? No, said the prosecuting counsel; we are building up an
argument, and it cannot be built up in a silent manner. In truth it was
designed for the public outside the court,(254) and not a touch could be
spared that might deepen the odium. Week after week the ugly tale went
on--a squalid ogre let loose among a population demoralised by ages of
wicked neglect, misery, and oppression. One side strove to show that the
ogre had been wantonly raised by the land league for political objects o