e, and the next day I was let out; and need enough I had to be let
out, for what with being alone, and living on the bread and water, I was
becoming frighted, or, as the doctors call it, narvous. But when I was
out--oh, what a change I found in the religious house! no card-playing,
for it had been forbidden to the scholars, and there was now nothing
going on but reading and singing; divil a merry visage to be seen, but
plenty of prim airs and graces; but the case of the scholars, though bad
enough, was not half so bad as mine, for they could spake to each other,
whereas I could not have a word of conversation, for the ould thaif of a
rector had ordered them to send me to 'Coventry,' telling them that I was
a gambling cheat, with morals bad enough to corrupt a horse regiment; and
whereas they were allowed to divert themselves with going out, I was kept
reading and singing from morn till night. The only soul who was willing
to exchange a word with me was the cook, and sometimes he and I had a
little bit of discourse in a corner, and we condoled with each other, for
he liked the change in the religious house almost as little as myself;
but he told me that, for all the change below stairs, there was still
card-playing going on above, for that the ould thaif of a rector, and the
sub-rector, and the almoner played at cards together, and that the rector
won money from the others--the almoner had told him so--and, moreover,
that the rector was the thaif of the world, and had been a gambler in his
youth, and had once been kicked out of a club-house at Dublin for
cheating at cards, and after that circumstance had apparently reformed
and lived decently till the time when I came to the religious house with
my pack, but that the sight of that had brought him back to his ould
gambling. He told the cook, moreover, that the rector frequently went
out at night to the houses of the great clergy and cheated at cards.

"In this melancholy state, with respect to myself, things continued a
long time, when suddenly there was a report that his Holiness the Pope
intended to pay a visit to the religious house in order to examine into
its state of discipline. When I heard this I was glad, for I determined,
after the Pope had done what he had come to do, to fall upon my knees
before him, and make a regular complaint of the treatment I had received,
to tell him of the cheatings at cards of the rector, and to beg him to
make the ould thaif give me