m the hills, or the curious noises made
from time to time by a small concourse of people, chiefly women,
assembled on the slope of an adjoining tenancy, the proceedings were as
dull as a parish meeting. What most struck me about the affair was the
patience and good-nature of the officers. In the two hours and a half
which we spent at West Lettur a New York Sheriff's deputies would have
put fifty tenants with all their bags and baggage out of as many houses
into the street. In fact it is very likely that at least that number of
New York tenants were actually so ousted from their houses during this
very time.

The evicted Mr. Griffin was a stout, stalwart man of middle age,
comfortably dressed, with the air rather of a citizen than of a farmer,
who took the whole thing most coolly, as did also his women-kind. All of
them were well dressed, and they superintended the removal and piling up
of their household goods as composedly as if they were simply moving out
of one house into another. The house itself was a large comfortable
house of the country, and it was amply furnished.

I commented on Griffin's indifference to the bailiff, a quiet,
good-natured man.

"Oh, he's quite familiar," was the reply; "it's the third time he's been
evicted! I believe's going to America."

"Oh! he will do very well," said a gentleman who had joined the
expedition like myself to see the scene. "He is a shrewd chap, and not
troubled by bashfulness. He sat on a Board of Guardians with a man I
knew four years ago, and one day he read out his own name, 'James
Griffin,' among a list of applicants for relief at Cahirciveen. The
chairman looked up, and said, 'Surely that is not your name you are
reading, is it?' 'It is, indeed,' replied Griffin, 'and I am as much in
need of relief as any one!' Perhaps you'll be surprised to hear he
didn't get it. This is a good holding he had, and he used to do pretty
well with it--not in his mother's time only of the flush prices, but in
his own. It was the going to Kilmainham that spoiled him."

"How did that spoil him?"

"Oh, it made a great man of him, being locked up. He was too well
treated there. He got a liking for sherry and bitters, and he's never
been able to make his dinner since without a nip of them. Mrs. Shee
knows that well."

To make an eviction complete and legal here, everything belonging to the
tenant, and every live creature must be taken out of the house. A cat
may save a house as a cat