o the mission schools, where they learnt carefully
selected texts of Scripture along with the multiplication-table. The
best of them were pushed on through Dublin University, and crowned the
hopes of their teachers by taking Holy Orders in the Church of England.
There are still to be met with in Galway and Mayo ancient peasants and
broken-down inhabitants of workhouses who speak with a certain pride
of 'my brother the minister.' There are also here and there in English
rectories elderly gentlemen who have almost forgotten the thatched
cottages where they ate their earliest potatoes.

Among these cleverer boys was one AEneas Conneally, who was something
more than clever. He was also religious in an intense and enthusiastic
manner, which puzzled his teachers while it pleased them. His ancestors
had lived for generations on a seaboard farm, watered by salt rain,
swept by misty storms. The famine and the fever that followed it left
him fatherless and brotherless. The emigration schemes robbed him and
his mother of their surviving relations. The mission school and the
missionary's charity effected the half conversion of the mother and a
whole-hearted acceptance of the new faith on the part of AEneas. Unlike
most of his fellows in the college classrooms, he refused to regard an
English curacy as the goal of his ambition. It seemed to him that his
conversion ought not to end in his parading the streets of Liverpool in
a black coat and a white tie. He wanted to return to his people and tell
them in their own tongue the Gospel which he had found so beautiful.

The London committee meditated on his request, and before they arrived
at a conclusion his mother died, having at the last moment made a
tardy submission to the Church she had denied. Her apostasy--so the
missionaries called it--confirmed the resolution of her son, and the
committee at length agreed to allow him to return to his native village
as the first Rector of the newly-created parish of Carrowkeel. He was
provided with all that seemed necessary to insure the success of
his work. They built him a gray house, low and strong, for it had to
withstand the gales which swept in from the Atlantic. They bought him
a field where a cow could graze, and an acre of bog to cut turf from. A
church was built for him, gray and strong, like his house. It was fitted
with comfortable pews, a pulpit, a reading-desk, and a movable table of
wood decently covered with a crimson cloth. Beyo