Quoth Mr. Sandes:—
'I'll run you a two mile steeplechase for a hundred guineas if you like, and I'll call my horse Home Rule—do you call yours Deasite; each to ride his own horse.'
No Kerry man could refuse such a challenge, and the race excited more interest than the election.
Mr. Sandes won, leaving 'Deasite' nowhere, and this helped Mr. Blennerhasset to head the poll.
More than one man is asserted to have voted for:—'Him you know that me landlord wants me to vote for.'
But I should say several dozen voted for:—
'Him you know that the priest, God bless him, tells me to vote for.'
The libel over which the action arose was alleged to have been published in the Cork Examiner, and the words complained of were pretty sturdy.
The jury returned a verdict of one farthing for the plaintiff priest, and I do not think he derived as much advertisement out of it as Miss Marie Corelli obtained from a similar coin of the realm.
Of course all this should have shown me that I had in my own interests better keep clear of Kerry politics, but after I had bought the Harenc estate, I stood for Tralee as a Tory against The O'Donoghue, who was a Nationalist. I never supposed I was going to get in, but I really had a capital run for the Parliamentary Handicap, though I was weighted by political convictions and penalised by my creed. The priests made a most active set against me. There were only fifty Protestants on the register, and yet I managed to get one hundred and thirty votes, for which suffrages some eighty honest men must have been well worrited in the confessional.