is
within two minutes' walk of my hostelry, and the equally hospitable and
more bustling City Club, but a little farther off, at the end of the
South Mall. At luncheon to-day a gentleman who was at Kilkenny with Mr.
Gladstone on the occasion of his visit to that city told me a story too
good to be lost. The party were eight in number, and on their return to
Abbeyleix they naturally looked out for an empty railway carriage. The
train was rather full, but in one compartment my informant descried a
dignitary, whom he knew, of the Protestant Church of Ireland, its only
occupant. He went up and saluted the Dean, and, pointing to his
companions, asked if he would object to changing his place in the train,
which would give them a compartment to themselves. The Dean courteously,
and indeed briskly, assented, when he saw that Mr. Gladstone was one of
the party.

After the train moved off, Mr. Gladstone said, "Was not that gentleman
who so kindly vacated his place for us a clergyman?"

"Yes." "I hope he won't think I have disestablished him again!"

At the next station, my informant getting out for a moment to thank the
Dean again for his civility, and chat with him, repeated Mr. Gladstone's
remark.

"Oh!" said the Dean; "you may tell him I don't mind his disestablishing
me again; for he didn't disendow me; he didn't confiscate my ticket!"

With this gentleman was another from Kerry, who tells me there is a
distinct change for the better already visible in that county, which he
attributes to the steady action of the Dublin authorities in enforcing
the law.

"The League Courts," he said, "are ceasing to be the terror they used to
be."

I asked what he meant by the "League Courts," when he expressed his
astonishment at my not knowing that it was the practice of the League to
hold regular Courts, before which the tenants are summoned, as if by a
process of the law, to explain their conduct, when they are charged with
paying their rents without the permission of the Local League. In his
part of Kerry, he tells me, these Courts used not very long ago to sit
regularly every Sunday. The idea, he says, is as old as the time of the
United Irishmen, who used to terrorise the country just in the same way.
A man whom he named, a blacksmith, acted as a kind of "Law Lord," and to
him the chairmen of the different local "Courts" used to refer cases
heard before them![5]

All this was testified to openly two years ago, before Lord Cowp