as scarcely your age. I've given my life to serving it.
To help the poor, and to keep faith and love for Him in their hearts.
To tache the little children and bring them up in the way of God. I've
baptised them when their eyes first looked out on this wurrld of
sorrows. I've given them in marriage, closed their eyes in death, and
read the last message to Him for their souls. And there are thousands
more like me, giving their lives to their little missions, trying to
kape the people's hearts clean and honest, so that their souls may go
to Him when their journey is ended."

Father Cahill took a deep breath as he finished. He had indeed summed
up his life's work. He had given it freely to his poor little flock.
His only happiness had been in ministering to their needs. And now to
have one to whom he had taught his first prayer, heard his first
confession and given him his first Holy Communion speak scoffingly of
the priest, hurt him as nothing else could hurt and bruise him.

The appeal was not lost on O'Connell. In his heart he loved Father
Cahill for the Christ-like life of self-denial he had passed in this
little place. But in his brain O'Connell pitied the old man for his
wasted years in the darkness of ignorance in which so many of the
villages of Ireland seemed to be buried.

O'Connell belonged to the "Young Ireland" movement. They wanted to
bring the searchlight of knowledge into the abodes of darkness in which
the poor of Ireland were submerged. To the younger men it seemed the
priests were keeping the people from enlightenment. And until the
fierce blaze of criticism could be turned on to the government of
cruelty and oppression there was small hope of freeing the people who
had suffered so long in silence. O'Connell was in the front band of men
striving to arouse the sleeping nation to a sense of its own power. And
nothing was going to stop the onward movement. It pained him to differ
from Father Cahill--the one friend of his youth. If only he could alter
the good priest's outlook--win him over to the great procession that
was marching surely and firmly to self-government, freedom of speech
and of action, and to the ultimate making of men of force out of the
crushed and the hopeless. He would try.

"Father Cahill," he began softly, as though the good priest might be
wooed by sweet reason when the declamatory force of the orator failed,
"don't ye think it would be wiser to attend a little more to the
people's