Soon after Blake came to Ballybor, the R.M. stationed there retired on pension, and in his place there came a young man, Anthony Mayne, who had served with distinction in an Irish regiment during the war. Being unmarried, Mayne took up his quarters in a small hotel close to the police barracks, and in a short time struck up a friendship with Blake. In addition to attending at Ballybor Petty Sessions once a week, Mayne had to go to several other small towns twice a month. The district was very large, chiefly wild mountainous country, and some of the places were many miles from Ballybor, one place in particular, Ballyrick, being over thirty miles away on the shores of the Atlantic. The first Court which Mayne attended happened to be at Ballyrick, probably one of the wildest and most thinly populated districts in Ireland. Soon after leaving Ballybor the road crossed a railway line by a level crossing close to the sea, and then ran for many miles between the sea and a chain of mountains to the small seaside town of Ballyrick. Mayne found that the people of this district were a race of small men; they looked as though the terrific Atlantic gales had stunted them in the same way as the trees are stunted on this coast, and, moreover, their faces were not pleasing. During his first Court here the nature of the cases showed plainly that the chief amusement of the peasants was to beat and batter each other on all opportunities, especially on dark nights after a fair, and the distillation of illicit whisky their chief occupation. In Ireland the penalty for harbouring, keeping, or concealing a still or illicit spirits is £100, which can be mitigated to £6, luckily no lower; and from time immemorial the custom of the shopkeeper class of magistrate has always been to reduce every fine to the minimum, with the natural result that the peasants have come to regard the £6 fine as the legal penalty for the bad luck of being caught by the police. £6 is a mere fraction of the profits of a successful brew of poteen, and is looked upon in the light of a tax paid to the Government. In one case a man was caught red-handed by the police with fourteen barrels of treacle, 200 gallons of wash, a complete still, and enough poteen to stock a fair-sized public-house. The man brought the £6 into Court with him, being certain he would be convicted and fined the usual amount. But Mayne, the only magistrate on the bench, took a very serious view of the case, knowing the amount of crime and misery caused by this abominable drink, and fined the man £50. Such a sentence had never been heard in Ballyrick Court-house within the memory of man; even the police received a shock, and a noise resembling a swarm of angry bees arose to defy the shouts of the police for silence and order. That evening, when Mayne returned to Ballybor, he was followed by a police car for many miles, but the peasants had not had time to organise their revenge.