priesthood.

"Any way it isn't a girl that's troubling him," he said to himself, and
he looked at Peter, and wondered how it was that Peter did not want to
be married. Peter was a great big fellow, over six feet high, that many
a girl would take a fancy to, and Pat Phelan had long had his eye on a
girl who would marry him. And his failure to sell the bullocks brought
all the advantages of this marriage to Pat Phelan's mind, and he began
to talk to his son. Peter listened, and seemed to take an interest in
all that was said, expressing now and then a doubt if the girl would
marry him; the possibility that she might seemed to turn his thoughts
again towards the priesthood.

The bullocks had stopped to graze, and Peter's indecisions threw Pat
Phelan fairly out of his humour.

"Well, Peter, I am tired listening to you. If it's a priest you want to
be, go in there, and Father Tom will tell you what you must do, and
I'll drive the bullocks home myself." And on that Pat laid his hand on
the priest's green gate, and Peter walked through.

II

There were trees about the priest's house, and there were two rooms on
the right and left of the front door. The parlour was on the left, and
when Peter came in the priest was sitting reading in his mahogany
arm-chair. Peter wondered if it were this very mahogany chair that had
put the idea of being a priest into his head. Just now, while walking
with his father, he had been thinking that they had not even a wooden
arm-chair in their house, though it was the best house in the
village--only some stools and some plain wooden chairs.

The priest could see that Peter had come to him for a purpose. But
Peter did not speak; he sat raising his pale, perplexed eyes, looking
at the priest from time to time, thinking that if he told Father Tom of
his failure at the fair, Father Tom might think he only wished to
become a priest because he had no taste for farming.

"You said, Father Tom, if I worked hard I should be able to read
Quintillian in six months."

The priest's face always lighted up at the name of a classical author,
and Peter said he was sorry he had been taken away from his studies.
But he had been thinking the matter over, and his mind was quite made
up, and he was sure he would sooner be a priest than anything else.

"My boy, I knew you would never put on the policeman's belt. The Bishop
will hold an examination for the places that are vacant in Maynooth."
Peter promised to