antes, or a Don Quixote, a fool who
has eclipsed the name of his Creator. But, as I am charitably inclined,
I shall give your learned friend the benefit of the doubt, and meet him
as one of my many admirers, rather than as one of my few critics.
Perhaps he may change his opinion of me, for better, for worse, on a
closer acquaintance."

"I'm quite sure, sir, that there will be a mutual appreciation. That's
arranged, then--the procession on Corpus Christi, and dinner the day of
our launch."

CHAPTER XXVI

AT THE ZENITH

For one reason or another, the great events to which our little history
is tending were deferred again and again, until at last the Monday
within the Octave of Corpus Christi was chosen for the marriage of
Bittra Campion and the launch of the great fishing-boat, that was to
bring untold wealth to Kilronan. Meanwhile our faculties were not
permitted to rust, for we had a glorious procession on the great
_Fete-Dieu_, organized, of course, and carried on to complete success by
the zeal and inventive piety of my young curate. My own timidity, and
dread of offending Protestant susceptibilities--a timidity, I suppose,
inherited from the penal days--would have limited that procession to the
narrow confines of the chapel yard; but the larger and more trusting
faith of Father Letheby leaped over such restrictions, and the
procession wound through the little village, down to the sheer cliffs
that overhang the sea, along the narrow footpath that cuts the turf on
the summit of the rocks, around the old mill, now the new factory, and
back by the main road skirting the bog and meadowland, to the village
church again. It would be quite useless to inquire how or where Father
Letheby managed to get those silken banners, and that glittering
processional cross, or the gorgeous canopy. I, who share with the
majority of my countrymen the national contempt for minutiae and mere
details, would have at once dogmatically declared the impossibility of
securing such beautiful things in such a pre-Adamite, out-of-the-way
village as Kilronan. But Father Letheby, who knows no such word as
impossibility, in some quiet way--the legerdemain of a strong
character--contrives to bring these unimaginable things out of the
region of conjecture into the realms of fact; and I can only stare and
wonder. But the whole thing was a great and unexampled success; and,
whilst my own heart was swelling under the influence of the sweet hymns