, peculiar interest
that was excited in her by any clergyman, merely in virtue of his
office, a person whose trade it was to occupy himself with the art and
practice of religion, which was a subject that had, quite apart from
its spiritual side, the same appeal for her that the art and practice
of the theatre has for many others. (It is hard to imagine any simile
that would have shocked Frederica more than this; in all her years of
strenuous, straightforward life, she had never, as she would have
said, set foot in a theatre.)

Frederica had been born at Coppinger's Court, and she had passed her
childhood there, but her youth had been spent in Dublin, in the hot
heart of a parish devoted to good works, and to a pastor whose power
and authority was in no degree less absolute than that of any of the
"Romish priests" whom he so heartily denounced. She was brought up in
that school of Irish Low Church Protestantism that makes more severe
demands upon submission and credulity than any other, and yet more
fiercely arraigns other creeds on those special counts. It is quite
arguable that Irish people, like the Israelites who so ardently
desired a king, enjoy and thrive under religious oppression, and it is
beyond dispute that among the oppressed, of both the rival creeds, are
saints whose saintliness has gained force from the systems to which
they have given their allegiance. To Frederica the practice of her
cult both inwardly in her heart, and outwardly in the work of St.
Matthew's Parish, was the mainspring of her existence. It was also her
pastime. She would analyse a sermon, as Dick Lowry would discuss a
run, and with the same eager enjoyment. She assented with enthusiasm
to the Doctrine of Eternal Damnation, and a gentler-hearted creature
than she never lived. She would have gone to the stake for the Verbal
Inspiration of the Bible; she was as convinced that the task of
Creation was completed in a week, as she was that she paid the
Coppinger's Court workmen for six days' work every Saturday evening.
In short, the good Frederica was a survival of an earlier and more
earnest period, and her religious beliefs were only comparable, in
their sincerity and simplicity, with those of the Roman Catholic poor
people, whose spiritual prospects were to her no less black
(theoretically) than were hers to them.

Those who know Ireland will have no difficulty in believing that Miss
Coppinger had no warmer sympathisers in her feelings co