Late in the evening came in a tall fine-looking Kerry squire, who told us, _à propos_ of the Fitzmaurice murder, that only a day or two ago a very decent tenant of his, who had taken over a holding from a disreputable kinsman, intending to manage it for the benefit of this kinsman's family, came to him and said he must give it up, as the Moonlighters had threatened him if he continued to hold it. A man of substance in Tralee gave me some startling facts as to the local administration here. In Tralee Union, he said, there were in 1879 eighty-seven persons receiving outdoor relief, at a cost to the Union of £30, 17s. 11d., being an average per head of 7s. 1d., and 1879 was a very bad year, the worst since the great famine year, 1847. A Nationalist Board was elected in 1880, and a Nationalist chairman in 1884. 1884 was a very good year, but in that year no fewer than 3434 persons received outdoor relief, at a cost of £2534, 13s. 10d., making an average per head of 14s. 9d.! And at the present time £5000 nominal worth of dishonoured cheques of the authorities were flying all over the county! "On whom," I asked, "does the burden fall of these levies and extravagances?" "On the landlords, not on the tenants," he promptly replied. "The landlord pays the whole of the rates on all holdings of less than £4 a year, and on all land which is either really or technically in his own possession. He also pays one-half of the rates on all the rest of his property." "Then, in a case like that of Griffin's, evicted at Glenbehy, with arrears going back to 1883, who would pay the rates?" "The landlord of course!"[4] CHAPTER VIII. CORK, _Thursday, Feb. 23d._--We left Tralee this morning. It was difficult to recognise the events yesterday witnessed by us at Glenbehy in the accounts which we read of them to-day when we got the newspapers. As these accounts are obviously intended to be read, not in Ireland, where nobody seems to take the least interest in Irish affairs beyond his own bailiwick, but in England and America, it is only natural, I suppose, that they should be coloured to suit the taste of the market for which they are destined. It is astonishing how little interest the people generally show in the newspapers. The Irish make good journalists as they make good soldiers; but most of the journalists who now represent Irish constituencies at Westminster find their chief field of activity, I am told, not in Irish but in British or in American journals. Mr. Roche, R.M., who travelled with us as far as Castle Island, where we left him, was much less moved by the grotesque accounts given in the local journals of his conduct yesterday than by Mr. Gladstone's "retractation" of the extraordinary attack which he made the other day upon Mr. Roche himself, and four other magistrates by name. "The retractation aggravates the attack," he said.