f them was acquitted; another, a woman, was discharged. Ten
of them signed, in open court, a guarantee not further to conspire, and
were thereupon discharged upon their own recognisances, after having
been sentenced with their companions to a month's imprisonment with hard
labour. The magistrate tells me that when the ten who signed (and who
were the most prosperous of the publicans) were preparing to sign, the
only representative of the press who was present, a reporter for _United
Ireland_, approached them in a threatening manner, with such an obvious
purpose of intimidation, that he was ordered out of the court-room by
the police. The eleven who refused to sign the guarantee (and who were
the poorest of the publicans, with least to lose) were sent to gaol.

An important feature of this case is the conduct of Father White, the
parish priest of Milltown Malbay. In the open court, Colonel Turner
tells me, Father White admitted that he was the moving spirit of all
this local "boycott." While the court was sitting yesterday all the
shops in Milltown Malbay were closed, Father White having publicly
ordered the people to make the town "as a city of the dead." After the
trial was over, and the eleven who elected to be locked up had left in
the train, Father White visited all their houses to encourage the
families, which, from his point of view, was no doubt proper enough; but
one of the sergeants reports that the Father went by mistake into the
house of one of the ten who had signed the guarantee, and immediately
reappeared, using rather unclerical language. All this to an American
resembles a tempest in a tea-pot. But it is a serious matter to see a
priest of the Church assisting laymen to put their fellow-men under a
social interdict, which is obviously a parody on one of the gravest
steps the Church itself can take to maintain the doctrine and the
discipline of the Faith. What Catholics, if honest, must think of this
whole business, I saw curiously illustrated by some marginal notes
pencilled in a copy of Sir Francis Head's _Fortnight in Ireland_, at the
hotel in Gweedore. The author of the _Bubbles from the Brunnen_
published this book in 1852. At page 152 he tells a story, apparently on
hearsay, of "boycotting" long before Boycott. It is to the effect that,
in order to check the proselyting of Catholics by a combination of
Protestant missionary zeal with Protestant donations of "meal," certain
priests and sisters in the