"Out with it, man!" I cried, laughing.

"I'm like Parson Kilmalieu upbye. You've heard of him--easy-going soul,
and God sain him! When it came to the bit, he turned the holy-water font
of Kilcatrine blue-stone upside-down, scooped a hole in the bottom,
and used the new hollow for Protestant baptism. 'There's such a throng
about heaven's gate,' said he, 'that it's only a mercy to open two;'
and he was a good and humour-some Protestant-Papist till the day he went
under the flagstones of his chapel upbye."

Now here was not a philosophy to my mind. I fought in the German wars
less for the kreutzers than for a belief (never much studied out,
but fervent) that Protestantism was the one good faith, and that
her ladyship of Babylon, that's ever on the ran-don, cannot
have her downfall one day too soon. You dare not be playing
corners-change-corners with religion as you can with the sword of what
the ill-bred have called a mercenary (when you come to ponder on't, the
swords of patriot or paid man are both for selfish ends unsheathed); and
if I set down here word for word what John Splendid said, it must not be
thought to be in homologation on my part of such latitudinarianism.

I let him run on in this key till we came to the change-house of a
widow--one Fraser--and as she curtsied at the door, and asked if the
braw gentlemen would favour her poor parlour, we went in and tossed a
quaich or two of aqua, to which end she set before us a little brown
bottle and two most cunningly contrived and carven cups made of the
Coillebhraid silver.

The houses in Inneraora were, and are, built all very much alike, on
a plan I thought somewhat cosy and genteel, ere ever I went abroad and
learned better. I do not even now deny the cosiness of them, but of
the genteelity it were well to say little. They were tall lands or
tenements, three storeys high, with through-going closes, or what the
English might nominate passages, running from front to back, and leading
at their midst to stairs, whereby the occupants got to their domiciles
in the flats above. Curved stairs they were, of the same blue-stone the
castle is built of, and on their landings at each storey they branched
right and left to give access to the single apartments or rooms and
kitchens of the residenters. Throng tenements they are these, even yet,
giving, as I write, clever children to the world. His Grace nowadays
might be granting the poor people a little more room to grow in,