It was very small, about two feet square, but it made its appeal to all the needs of humanity from the cradle to the grave.  A feeding-bottle, a rosary, a photograph of Mr. Kruger, a peg-top, a case of salmon flies, an artistic letter-weight, consisting of a pigeon’s egg carved in Connemara marble, two seductively small bottles of castor-oil—­these, mounted on an embankment of packets of corn-flour and rat poison, crowded the four little panes.  Inside the shop the assortment ranged from bundles of reaping-hooks on the earthen floor to bottles of champagne in the murk of the top shelf.  A few men leaned against the tin-covered counter, gravely drinking porter.  As we stood dubiously at the door there was a padding of bare feet in the roadway, and a very small boy with a red head, dressed in a long flannel frock of a rich madder shade fluttered past us into the shop.

“Me dada says let yees be hurrying!” he gasped, between spasms of what was obviously whooping-cough.  “Sweeny’s case is comin’ on!”

Had the message been delivered by the Sergeant-at-Arms it could not have been received with more respectful attention or been more immediately obeyed.  The porter was gulped down, one unfinished glass being bestowed upon the Sergeant-at-Arms, possibly as a palliative for the whooping-cough, and the party trooped up the road towards a thatched and whitewashed cottage that stood askew at the top of a lane leading to the seashore.  Two tall constables of the R.I.C. stood at the door of the cottage.  It came to us, with a lifting of the heart, that we had chanced upon Petty Sessions day in Letterbeg, and this was the court-house.

It was uncommonly hot in what is called in newspapers “the body of the court”.  Something of the nature of a rood-screen, boarded solidly up to a height of about four feet, divided the long single room of the cottage; we, with the rest of the public, were penned in the division nearest the door.  The cobwebbed boards of the loft overhead almost rested on our hats; the public, not being provided with seats by the Government, shuffled on the earthen floor and unaffectedly rested on us and each other.  Within the rood-screen two magistrates sat at a table, with their suite, consisting of a clerk, an interpreter, and a district inspector of police, disposed round them.

“The young fella with the foxy mustash is Docthor Lyden,” whispered an informant in response to a question, “and the owld lad that’s lookin’ at ye now is Heraty, that owns the shop above—­”

At this juncture an emissary from the Bench very kindly offered us seats within the rood-screen.  We took them, on a high wooden settle, beside the magisterial table, and the business of the court proceeded.

Close to us stood the defendant, Sweeny, a tall elderly man, with a long, composed, shaven face, and an all-observant grey eye:  Irish in type, Irish in expression, intensely Irish in the self-possession in which he stood, playing to perfection the part of calm rectitude and unassailable integrity.