Sketches from Ireland: police starting at midnight to make arrests, 1870. In continuation of the "Sketches from Ireland," furnished by our Special Artist, who is commissioned to seek Illustrations of the state of the peasantry and of the disputes and outrages relating to the land question, we engrave this week one of the stipendiary magistrates and armed police at Castlereagh, starting from the police-barracks to arrest the leaders of the illegal conspiracy in the neighbourhood of the Hundred Acres. This was at midnight on the 20th April, in consequence of the act of violence perpetrated on the night of the 18th, when the cabin of Mike Brannan,...was broken into by a gang of twenty men, who forced him to take an oath that he would "be loyal to the country, and pay no rent beyond the poor-law valuation of his holding." Three nights before that incident, a similar party entered the cottage of James Vesey, at Pollinnity, on the borders of Roscommon, and compelled him by threats of death to swear that he would give up his garden to a widow named Homan. Several of the conspirators have been arrested, and will be tried at the county assizes; more than a hundred of their supposed accomplices have fled to avoid apprehension. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.