ly.

Any child in the Island will tell you the story of Father Anthony
O'Toole. Here and there an old man or woman will remember to have seen
him and will describe him--tall despite his great age, with the frost
on his head but never in his heart, stepping down the cobbles of the
village street leaning on his gold-headed cane, and greeting his
spiritual children with such a courtesy as had once been well in place
at Versailles or the Little Trianon. Plainly he never ceased to be the
finest of fine gentlemen, though a less inbred courtesy might well
rust in the isolation of thirty years. Yet he seems to have been no
less the humblest and simplest of priests. Old Peter Devine will tell
you his childish memory of the old priest sitting by the turf fire in
the fisherman's cottage, listening to the eternal complaint of the
winds and waters that had destroyed the fishing and washed the
potato-gardens out to sea, and pausing in his words of counsel and
sympathy to take delicately a pinch of the finest snuff, snuff that
had never bemeaned itself by paying duty to King George.

But that was in the quite peaceful days, when the country over there
beyond the shallow water lay in the apathy of exhaustion--helpless and
hopeless. That was years after Father Anthony had flashed out as a man
of war in the midst of his quiet pastoral days, and like any Old
Testament hero had taken the sword and smitten his enemies in the name
of the Lord.

Father Anthony was the grandson of one of those Irish soldiers of
fortune who, after the downfall of the Jacobite cause in Ireland, had
taken service in the French and Austrian armies. In Ireland they
called them the Wild Geese. He had risen to high honours in the armies
of King Louis, and had been wounded at Malplaquet. The son followed in
his father's footsteps and was among the slain at Fontenoy. Father
Anthony, too, became a soldier and saw service at Minden, and carried
away from it a wound in the thigh which made necessary the use of that
gold-headed cane. They said that, soldier as he was, he was a fine
courtier in his day. One could well believe it looking at him in his
old age. From his father he had inherited the dashing bravery and gay
wit of which even yet he carried traces. From his French mother he had
the delicate courtesy and _finesse_ which would be well in place in
the atmosphere of a court.

However, in full prime of manhood and reputation, Father Anthony, for
some reason or ot