years there
will be no Irish people--at least, none in Ireland. Then the English and
Scotch will come and make something of the country.'

From Canon Beecher he met with scarcely more sympathy or understanding.

'Yes,' he admitted, 'no doubt we ought to make more efforts than we do
to convert our fellow-countrymen. But it is very difficult to see how we
are to go to work. There is one society which exists for this purpose.
Its friends are full of the very kind of enthusiasm which you describe.
I could point you out plenty of its agents whose whole souls are
in their work, but you know as well as I do how completely they are
failing.'

'But,' said Hyacinth, 'I do not in the least mean that we should start
more missions to Roman Catholics. It does not seem to me to matter much
what kind of religion a man professes, and I should be most unwilling to
uproot anyone's belief. What we ought to do is throw our whole force and
energy into the work of regenerating Ireland. It is possible for us to
do this, and we ought to try.'

'Well, well,' said the Canon, 'I must not let you make me argue with
you, Conneally; but I hope you won't preach these doctrines of yours to
my daughters. I think it is better for them to drop their pennies into
missionary collecting-boxes, and leave the tangled problems of Irish
politics to those better able to understand them than we are.'

CHAPTER XV

There are certain professions, in themselves honest, useful, and even
estimable, for which society has agreed to entertain a feeling of
contempt. It is, for instance, very difficult to think of a curate
as anything except a butt for satirists, or to be respectful to the
profession of tailoring, although many a man for private pecuniary
reasons is meek before the particular individual who makes his clothes.
Yet the novelist and the playwright, who hold the mirror up to modern
humanity, are occasionally kind even to curates and tailors. There is a
youthful athlete in Holy Orders who thrashes, to our immense admiration,
the village bully, bewildering his victim and his admirers with his
mastery of what is described a little vaguely as the 'old Oxford
science.' Once, at least, a glamour of romance has been shed over the
son of a tailor, and it becomes imaginable that even the chalker of
unfinished coats may in the future be posed as heroic. There is still,
however, a profession which no eccentric novelist has ever ventured to
represent as other