in the machinery of mischief.  The places where the oaths of this local “Mafia” are administered, for instance, are well known.  A roadside near a chapel is frequently selected—­and this for two or three obvious reasons.  The sanctity of the spot may be supposed to impress the neophyte; and if the police or any other undesirable people should suddenly come upon the officiating adepts and the expectant acolyte, a group on the roadside is not necessarily a criminal gathering—­though I do not see why, in such times, our old American college definition of a “group” as a gathering of “three or more persons” should not be adopted by the authorities, and held to make such a gathering liable to dispersion by the police, as our “groups” used to be subject to proctorial punishment.  Mills are another favourite resort of the law-breakers.  Mr. Tener tells me that a large mill between this place and Loughrea is a great centre of trouble, not wholly to the disadvantage of the astute miller, who finds it not only brings grist to his mill, but takes away grist from another mill belonging to a couple of worthy ladies, and once quite prosperous.  It is no uncommon thing, it appears, for the same person to be put through the ceremony of swearing fidelity more than once, and at more than one place, with the not unnatural result, however, of diminishing the pressure of the oath upon his conscience or his fears, and also of alienating his affections, as he is expected to pay down two shillings on each occasion.  Once a member, he contributes a penny a week to the general fund.  It seems also to be an open secret who the disbursing treasurers are of this fund, from whom the members, detailed to do the dark bidding of the “organisation,” receive their wage.  “A stout gentleman with sandy hair and wearing glasses” was the description given to me of one such functionary.  When so much is known of the methods and the men, why is it that so many crimes are committed with virtual impunity?  For two sufficient reasons.  Witnesses cannot be got to testify, or trusted, if they do testify, to speak the truth; and it is idle to expect juries of the vicinage in nine cases out of ten will do their duty.  Political cowardice having made it impossible to transfer the venue in cases of Irish crime, as to which all the authorities were agreed about these points, from Ireland into Great Britain, it is found that even to transfer the trial of “Moonlighters” from Clare or Kerry into Wicklow, for example, has a most instructive effect, opening the eyes of the people of Wicklow to a state of things in their own island, of which happily for themselves they were previously as ignorant as the people of Surrey or of Middlesex.  This explains the indignant wish expressed to me some time ago in a letter from a priest in another part of Ireland, that “martial law” might be proclaimed in Clare and Kerry to “stamp out the Moonlighters, those pests of society.”  That in Clare and Kerry priests should be found not