ellow was weary from all the lecturing. Indeed, I
think too his mind had rather a practical cast; for he began to ply me
with questions about the parish that fairly astonished me.

"Did Pat Herlihy's big boy make his First Communion? What about
establishing a First Confession class? He heard there was a night-dance
at the cross-roads, half-ways to Moydore. Why don't the Moydore priests
stop it? Did I know Winifred Lane, a semi-imbecile up in the mountains?
He did not like one of the teachers. He thought him disrespectful. What
was the cause of the coolness between the Learys and the Sheas? Was it
the way that one of the Sheas, about sixty years ago, served on a jury,
at which some disreputable Leary was convicted? What about a bridge over
that mountain torrent at Slieveogue? He had written to the surveyor. Did
I think the nuns in Galway would take a postulant? He heard that there
was a sister home from New Zealand who was taking out young girls--"

"My dear young friend," I said, when I had tried to answer imperfectly
this catechism, "I know you are a saint, and therefore endowed with the
privilege of bilocation; but I did not know that you could dictate to
six amanuenses at the same time, like Caesar or Suarez."

"Oh, by the way," he said, putting up his note-book, "I was near
forgetting. With your permission, sir, I intend to put up a little crib
at Christmas. Now, the roof is leaking badly over St. Joseph's Chapel.
If you allow me, I shall put Jem Deady on the roof. He says you know him
well, and can recommend him, and there are a few pounds in my hands from
the Living Rosary."

It was true. I knew Jem Deady very well, as a confirmed dipsomaniac, who
took the Total Abstinence Pledge for life regularly every three months.
I also knew that that leak over St. Joseph's Chapel had been a steady
source of income to Jem for the last ten years. Somehow it was an
incurable malady, a kind of stone and mortar scrofula that was always
breaking out, and ever resisting the science of this amiable physician.
Sometimes it was "ground-damp," sometimes the "weeping wall"; and there
were dread dissertations on barge courses and string courses, but there
the evil was, ugly and ineradicable.

"I dare say, Jem told you that I had been putting cobblers from the
village every winter for the last ten years on that roof and that he
alone possesses the secret that will make that wall a 'thing of beauty
and a joy forever'?"

"Well, indeed