days
his Reverence was a youngish man, ruddy, and of a cheerful countenance,
a substantial load for his sturdy nag, and altogether, in his glossy
black cloth, a figure very different from their gaunt, sad-visaged,
shaggily-garbed old guest. He was at the time of Father Rooney's
approach seated on a two-legged, three-legged stool, propped
precariously against the ray-rosed cabin wall, and was teaching Dan and
Nicholas the twelfth proposition of the second book of Euclid. Dan had
not yet grasped it, but it all lay as clear as a sunbeam athwart
Nicholas's brain, and he was fidgeting like an impatient horse at the
slowness of his fellow.

Several of the neighbours chanced to be about, for the forge saw a good
deal of company in those long empty days before the potato-digging could
begin. They all drew together into a small crowd, and closed in step by
step to watch the first meeting between these two notable persons, much
admiring the deftness with which old O'Beirne secured it by pronouncing
one of the pony's shoes in need of tightening, and the felicitous
opening he made by assuring his Reverence that "divil a bit need he be
mindin' the delay, because Mr. Polymathers there had enough _furrin
languages_ to keep thim all divarted, if the baste owned as many feet as
a forty-legs, wid the shoes droppin' off ivery pair of thim. That was to
say, in coorse, supposin' he got the chance of convarsin' a bit wid
somebody aquil to answerin' him back iligant, the way there wasn't e'er
a one of thim could make an offer at doin' no more than thim little
weevils of chirpin' chuckens."

Yet the interview turned out disappointingly after all. If such a thing
had not been, of course, exceedingly improbable, one might have fancied
that each scholar stood in awe of the other's reputation, they steered
so clear of all recondite subjects; keeping to the merest commonplaces
about rain and potatoes and turf--which anybody else could have
discussed quite as knowledgably. In vain, whenever there was a promising
pause would the bystanders nudge one another, whispering, hopefully,
"Whist, boys--they'll be sayin' somethin' now." Only the plainest
English followed, and at last, when Father Rooney rode on, his parting
joke, which referred to the difficulty his pony would now find in the
way of becoming a barefooted pilgrim, left for a wonder solemnly
irresponsive faces behind it.

Michael Ryan said, with a touch of resentment, "Ah, well, one couldn't