n of the old Ulster Roman Catholic.
He was a tall, powerful man, of nearly seventy at the time when our
story opens, while he did not look sixty. His hair was long,
iron-grey, and wiry, and it was only when uncovered that the high,
bald, wrinkled forehead gave indication of his real age. A rebel at
heart, the son of a man who had been "out" in '98, Michael had gone
through life with a feeling that every man's hand was against him.
Sober, self-reliant, and hard-working, the man was grasping and hard as
flint. By tradition and instinct a bitter enemy to Protestantism, he
was not on that account a friend of the priest, or a particularly
faithful son of the Church. He had his own "notions" about things, and
though a professed "Catholic," his neighbours used to speculate whether
age or sickness would ever have power to bend that proud spirit, and
bring Michael to confession and a humble reception of the "last rites"
of the Church. Early in life McAravey had married a Presbyterian girl,
and the almost inevitable estrangement that results from a "mixed
marriage" had cast its shadow over the lives of the pair. The Kanes
had belonged to the small and rigid body of "Covenanters," and never a
Sabbath from childhood till her marriage had 'Lisbeth failed to walk
the four rough, up-hill, dreary miles that separated her father's home
from the meeting-house that rose alone, and stern as the Covenant
itself, on the bleak moorland above Glenariff. But her last
Sabbath-day's journey was taken the week before her wedding. Michael
had gloomily announced that no wife of his should be seen going to a
"meeting-house," and though he never sought to bring her to mass
(perhaps in part because it might have involved going himself), his
resolution never varied. Nor did his wife contend against it. The
habit once broken, she felt no inclination to undertake those long and
wearisome journeys. But a Covenanter she meant to live and die.
Nothing would have tempted her into the Presbyterian chapel close by.
And thus when there came two children to be baptized the difficulty as
to religion was compromised, and a triumph allowed to neither side, by
the babes being solemnly received into the compassionate and truly
Catholic fold of what was then the Established Church. That both these
little ones had been taken away by death was a misfortune, and tended
to harden even more the somewhat disagreeable and rigid lines that
marked the individuality o