During this period the stories of the evictions brought home to me by Parnell himself made my heart sick, and often he sat far into the night at Eltham speaking in that low, broken monotone, that with him always betokened intense feeling strongly held in check, of the terrible cruelty of some of the things done in the name of justice in unhappy Ireland. How old people, and sometimes those sick beyond recovery, women with the children they had borne but a few hours before, little children naked as they had come into the world, all thrust out from the little squalid cabins which were all they had for home, thrust out on the roadside to perish, or to live as they could. I in my English ignorance used to say: "Why did they not go into the workhouse or to neighbours?" and Parnell would look wonderingly at me as he told me that for the most part such places were few and far between in Ireland, and "neighbours," good as they were to each other, were in the same trouble. There were instances where a wife would beg, and with none effect, that the bailiffs and police should wait but the little half-hour that her dying husband drew his last breath; and where a husband carried his wife from her bed to the "shelter" of the rainswept moor that their child might be born out of the sight of the soldiers deputed to guard the officials who had been sent to pull their home about their ears. And, remembering these and so many other tales of some of the 50,000 evictions that he afterwards calculated had taken place in Ireland, I have never wondered at the implacable hatred of England that can never really die out of the Irish heart. {82} On December 4th, 1880, he wrote to me from Dublin: I was exceedingly pleased to receive your letters; to say the truth, I have been quite homesick since leaving Eltham, and news from you seems like news from home. The Court refused our application to-day for a postponement of the trial (of the Land League), but this we expected, and it does not much signify, as it turns out that we need not necessarily attend the trial unless absolutely directed to do so by the Court. You will also be pleased to hear that the special jury panel, of which we obtained a copy last night, is of such a character as in the opinion of competent judges to give us every chance of a disagreement by the jury in their verdict, but we cannot, of course, form an absolute conclusion until the jury has been sworn, when we shall be able to tell pretty certainly one way or the other. Since writing Captain O'Shea it does not look as if I could get further away from Ireland than London, as Paris is inconvenient from its distance. I have no letter from him yet in reply to mine. And again on the 9th:--