to see the advantage to them of this.  The sergeant told me of a publican here in Ennis, into whose public came three Nationalists, bent not upon drinking, but upon talking.  The publican said nothing for a while, but finally, in a careless way, mentioned “a letter he had just received from Mr. Parnell on a very private matter.”  Instantly the politicians were eager to see it.  The publican hesitated.  The politicians immediately called for drinks, which were served, and after this operation had been three times repeated, the publican produced the letter, began with a line or two, and then said, “Ah, no! it can’t be done.  It would be a betrayal of confidence; and you know you wouldn’t have that!  But it’s a very important letter you have seen!” So they went away tipsy and happy.

Only yesterday no fewer than twenty-three of these publicans from Milltown Malbay appeared at Ennis here to be tried for “boycotting” the police.  One of 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