reafter! Why can I not shake the thoughts of it from my conscience?
Religion! Christianity! With all the hardness of an infidel's heart, I
feel your truth; because, if every man were the villain that infidelity
would make him, then indeed might every man curse God for the existence
bestowed upon him--as I would, but dare not do. Yet why can I not
believe? Alas! why should God accept an unrepentant heart? Am I not a
hypocrite, mocking Him by a guilty pretension to His power, and leading
the dark into thicker darkness? Then these hands--blood!--broken
vows!--ha! ha! ha! Well, go--let misery have its laugh, like the light
that breaks from the thunder-cloud. Prefer Voltaire to Christ; sow the
wind, and reap the whirlwind, as I have done--ha, ha, ha! Swim,
world--swim about me! I have lost the ways of Providence, and am dark!
_She_ awaits me; but I broke the chain that galled us: yet it still
rankles--still rankles!"

The unhappy man threw himself into a chair in a paroxysm of frenzied
agony. For more than an hour he sat in the same posture, until he became
gradually hardened into a stiff, lethargic insensibility, callous and
impervious to feeling, reason, or religion--an awful transition from a
visitation of conscience so terrible as that which he had just suffered.
At length he arose, and by walking moodily about, relapsed into his
usual gloomy and restless character.

When Bartley went home, he communicated to his wife Father Philip's
intention of calling on the following day, to hear a correct account of
the _Lianhan Shee_.

"Why, thin," said she, "I'm glad of it, for I intinded myself to go to
him, any way, to get my new scapular consecrated. How-an'-ever, as he's
to come, I'll get a set of gospels for the boys an' girls, an' he can
consecrate all when his hand's in. Aroon, Bartley, they say that man's
so holy that he can do anything--ay, melt a body off the face o' the
earth, like snow off a ditch. Dear me, but the power they have is
strange all out!"

"There's no use in gettin' him anything to ate or dhrink," replied
Bartley; "he wouldn't take a glass o' whisky once in seven years.
Throth, myself thinks he's a little too dhry; sure he might be holy
enough, an' yet take a sup of an odd time. There's Father Felix, an'
though we all know he's far from bein' so blessed a man as him, yet he
has friendship an' neighbourliness in him, an' never refuses a glass in
rason."

"But do you know what I was tould about Father