y, "when we are called upon to do so; but
for my part, I must confess, I have no relish whatsoever for the honors
of martyrdom. I would rather aid it and assist it than suffer for it."

The bishop gave a stem look at his friends, as much as to say: "You
hear! incipient heresy and treachery at the first step."

"He's more mad than the bishop," thought Father Maguire; "in God's name
what will come next, I wonder? Reilly's blood, somehow, is up; and there
they are looking at each other, like a pair o' game cocks, with their
necks stretched out in a cockpit--when I was a boy I used to go to see
them--ready to dash upon one another."

"Are you not now suffering for your religion?" asked the prelate.

"No," replied Reilly, "it is not for the sake of my religion that I have
suffered any thing. Religion is made only a pretext for it; but it is
not, in truth, on that account that I have been persecuted."

"Pray, then, sir, may I inquire the cause of your persecution?"

"You may," replied Reilly, "but I shall decline to answer you. It comes
not within your jurisdiction, but is a matter altogether personal to
myself, and with which you can have no concern."

Here a groan from the priest, which he could not suppress, was shivered
off, by a tremendous effort, into a series of broken coughs, got up
in order to conceal his alarm at the fatal progress which Reilly, he
thought, was unconsciously making to his own ruin.

"Troth," thought he, "the soldiers were nothing at all to what this will
be. There his friends would have found the body and given him a decent
burial; but here neither friend nor fellow will know where to look for
him. I was almost the first man that took the oath to keep the existence
of this place secret from all unless those that were suffering for their
religion; and now, by denying that, he has me in the trap along with
himself."

A second groan, shaken out of its continuity into another comical shower
of fragmental coughs, closed this dreary but silent soliloquy.

The bishop proceeded: "You have been inveigled, young man, by the charms
of a deceitful and heretical syren, for the purpose of alienating you
from the creed of your forefathers."

"It is false," replied Reilly; "false, if it proceeded from the lips of
the Pope himself; and if his lips uttered to me what you now have done,
I would fling the falsehood in his teeth, as I do now in yours--yes,
if my life should pay the forfeit of it. What have yo