We established
ourselves at the County Kerry Club on our arrival in Tralee, which I
found to be a brisk prosperous-looking town, and quite well built. A
Nationalist member once gave me a gloomy notion of Tralee, by telling
me, when I asked him whether he looked forward with longing to a seat in
the Parliament of Ireland, that "when he was in Dublin now he always
thought of London, just as when he used to be in Tralee he always
thought of Dublin." But he did less than justice to the town upon the
Lee. We left it at half-past four in the train for Killorglin. The
little station there was full of policemen and soldiers, and knots of
country people stood about the platform discussing the morrow. There had
been some notion that the car-drivers at Killorglin might "boycott" the
authorities. But they were only anxious to turn an honest penny by
bringing us on to this lonely but extremely neat and comfortable
hostelry in the hills.

We left the Sheriff and the escort to find their way as best they could
after us.

Mrs. Shee, the landlady here, ushered us into a very pretty room hung
with little landscapes of the country, and made cheery by a roaring
fire. Two or three officers of the soldiers sent on here to prevent any
serious uproar to-morrow dined with us.

The constabulary are in force, but in great good humour. They have no
belief that there will be any trouble, though all sorts of wild tales
were flying about Tralee before we left, of English members of
Parliament coming down to denounce the "Coercion" law, and of risings in
the hills, and I know not what besides. The agent of the Winn property,
or of Mr. Head of Reigate in Surrey, the mortgagee of the estate, who
holds a power of attorney from Mr. Winn, is here, a quiet, intelligent
young man, who has given me the case in a nut-shell.

The tenant to be evicted, James Griffin, is the son and heir of one Mrs.
Griffin, who on the 5th of April 1854 took a lease of the lands known as
West Lettur from the then Lord Headley and the Hon. R. Winn, at the
annual rent of L32, 10s. This rent has since been reduced by a judicial
process to L26. In 1883 James Griffin, who was then, as he is now, an
active member of the local branch of the National League, and who was
imprisoned under Mr. Gladstone's Act of 1881 as a "suspect," was
evicted, being then several years in arrears. He re-entered unlawfully
immediately afterwards, and has remained in West Lettur unlawfully ever
since, a