was always on his keeping, and couldn't show
himself out of doors except on Sundays, for fear of the bailiffs. And
the Browns of Mount Dillon, and the Browns of Castle Brown; and General
Bourke of Creamstown. All these families lived within fifteen or
sixteen miles of Kelly's Court, and prevented the O'Kellys from
feeling themselves quite isolated from the social world. Their nearest
neighbours, however, were the Armstrongs, and of them they saw a great
deal.

The Reverend Joseph Armstrong was rector of Ballindine, and Mrs O'Kelly
was his parishioner, and the only Protestant one he had; and, as Mr
Armstrong did not like to see his church quite deserted, and as Mrs
O'Kelly was, as she flattered herself, a very fervent Protestant, they
were all in all to each other.

Ballindine was not a good living, and Mr Armstrong had a very large
family; he was, therefore, a poor man. His children were helpless,
uneducated, and improvident; his wife was nearly worn out with the
labours of bringing them forth and afterwards catering for them; and
a great portion of his own life was taken up in a hard battle with
tradesmen and tithe-payers, creditors, and debtors. Yet, in spite of
the insufficiency of his two hundred a-year to meet all or half his
wants, Mr Armstrong was not an unhappy man. At any moment of social
enjoyment he forgot all his cares and poverty, and was always the
first to laugh, and the last to cease to do so. He never refused an
invitation to dinner, and if he did not entertain many in his own
house, it was his fortune, and not his heart, that prevented him from
doing so. He could hardly be called a good clergyman, and yet his
remissness was not so much his own fault as that of circumstances. How
could a Protestant rector be a good parish clergyman, with but one old
lady and her daughters, for the exercise of his clerical energies and
talents? He constantly lauded the zeal of St. Paul for proselytism;
but, as he himself once observed, even St. Paul had never had to deal
with the obstinacy of an Irish Roman Catholic. He often regretted the
want of work, and grieved that his profession, as far as he saw and had
been instructed, required nothing of him but a short service on every
Sunday morning, and the celebration of the Eucharist four times a-year;
but such were the facts; and the idleness which this want of work
engendered, and the habits which his poverty induced, had given him
a character as a clergyman, very diffe