CHAPTER VIII.

Cork, Thursday, Feb. 23d.—­We left Tralee this morning.  It was difficult to recognise the events yesterday witnessed by us at Glenbehy in the accounts which we read of them to-day when we got the newspapers.

As these accounts are obviously intended to be read, not in Ireland, where nobody seems to take the least interest in Irish affairs beyond his own bailiwick, but in England and America, it is only natural, I suppose, that they should be coloured to suit the taste of the market for which they are destined.  It is astonishing how little interest the people generally show in the newspapers.  The Irish make good journalists as they make good soldiers; but most of the journalists who now represent Irish constituencies at Westminster find their chief field of activity, I am told, not in Irish but in British or in American journals.  Mr. Roche, R.M., who travelled with us as far as Castle Island, where we left him, was much less moved by the grotesque accounts given in the local journals of his conduct yesterday than by Mr. Gladstone’s “retractation” of the extraordinary attack which he made the other day upon Mr. Roche himself, and four other magistrates by name.

“The retractation aggravates the attack,” he said.

When one sees what a magistrate now represents in Ireland, it certainly is not easy to reconcile an inconsiderate attack upon the character and conduct of such an officer with the most elementary ideas of good citizenship.

After Mr. Roche left us, a gentleman in the carriage, who is interested in some Castle Island property, told us that nothing could be worse than the state of that region.  Open defiance of the moral authority of the clergy is as rife there, he says, as open defiance of the civil authorities.  The church was not long ago broken into, and the sacred vestments were defiled; and, but the other day, a young girl of the place came to a magistrate and asked him to give her a summons against the parish priest “for assaulting her.”  The magistrate, a Protestant, but a personal friend of the priest, esteeming him for his fidelity to his duties, asked the girl what on earth she meant.  She proceeded with perfect coolness to say that the priest had impertinently interfered with her, “assaulted her,” and told her to “go home,” when he found her sitting in a lonely part of the road with her young man, rather late at night!  For this, the girl, professing to be a Catholic, actually wanted the Protestant magistrate to have her parish priest brought into his court!  He told the girl plainly what he thought of her conduct, whereupon she went away, very angry, and vowing vengeance both against the priest and against him.

This same gentleman said that at the Bodyke evictions, of which so much has been heard, the girls and women swarmed about the police using language so revoltingly obscene that the policemen blushed—­such language, he said, as was never heard from decent Irishwomen in the days of his youth.