A similar fate befell two girls named Murphy merely because they were suspected of speaking to a policeman.

A man named Finlay was boycotted and then shot dead, and the neighbours jeered and laughed at his wife, when in her agony she was wringing her hands in grief.

The poor woman went into the street and knelt down crying:—­

’The curse of God rest upon Father ——­ for being the cause of my husband’s murder.’

The priest had denounced him from the altar on the previous Sunday.

‘Carding’ has always been a favourite Irish form of physically insinuating to a man that he is not exactly popular.  It consists of a wooden board with nails in it being drawn down the naked flesh of a man’s face and body.  This foul torture was often heard of, and it has been whispered that women and even girls have been the victims of this atrocity.

The merciful man is proverbially merciful to his beast, and those who showed mercy to neither man nor woman had none on the dumb animals owned by their victims.

A valuable Spanish ass belonging to Mr. M’Cowan of Tralee was saturated with paraffin, set on fire, and horribly burned.

A farmer named Lambert found the shoulder of a heifer had been smashed by some blunt instrument like a hammer.  I myself had a couple of cows killed and salted.

Indeed cattle outrages became incidents of nightly occurrence.  Tenants in all disturbed counties, besides having their houses burnt, saw their cattle so horribly mutilated that the poor dumb creatures had to be killed to put them out of their misery.  The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have no chance of obtaining general support among the lower classes in Kerry, where beasts belonging to your enemy are simply regarded as so many goods and chattels, to be as badly damaged as possible.

It is a curious thing that the Irish and the Italian are the two most poetic and most sensitive races of Europe, and also are the two which exhibit the greatest indifference to the sufferings of dumb animals.

The distress in Kerry, of course, in the winter of 1879 had been as great as in the more famous famine, and I have heard the theory advanced in a London drawing-room that physical suffering renders uneducated people indifferent to any torture endured by animals.  Personally, I should have thought a fellow feeling made us wondrous kind.

Reverting to matters with which I had more personal connection, an interesting episode occurred in June 1881, when The O’Donoghue moved the adjournment of the House of Commons to force a debate upon the subject of Lord Kenmare’s estate, and I wrote a letter in the Times in reply, from which may be condensed the following facts:—­

On the Cork estate, from 1878 to 1881, the evictions did not average one for each year for every two hundred tenants.

On the Limerick estate for five years there have been no evictions.