so
"frightfully interesting," was beginning to pall. Boring as were the
personal interviews, and exhausting the evening oratory in town halls
and school-houses, the Sunday meetings at the gates of the chapels
were still more arduous. On each Sunday, during the period between the
death of Daniel Prendergast and the election of his successor, did
young Mr. Coppinger, with chosen members of his "Commy-tee"--he had
learnt to accept the inflexible local pronunciation--splash from
chapel to chapel, to meet the congregations, and to shout platitudes
to them. Larry began to feel that no conviction--however fervently
held--could survive the ordeal of being slowly yelled to a bored crowd
from the front seat of a motor car. He told himself that he had become
a gramophone, and a tired gramophone, badly in want of winding up, at
that.

It would be of little avail to attempt to define the precise shade of
green of young Mr. Coppinger's political flag; whether, as a facetious
supporter put it, it was "say-green, pay-green, tay-green, or bottle."
It is enough to say that it varied sufficiently from that of Mr. Burke
to provide their respective followers with a satisfactory _casus
belli_. The shades of political opinion in Ireland change, and melt
and merge into each other as the years pass, even as the colours of
her surrounding seas vary, deepening and paling with the changing
clouds, yet affecting only the surface, leaving the sullen depths
unchanged. Larry knew no more of Ireland than a boy can learn in his
school holidays; it was only by degrees that he realised that in
Ireland, as he now found it, the single element of discord that
remained ever unchanged was Religion. He had spent the four most
recent and most receptive years of his life in an atmosphere in which
religion had no existence. The hem of its raiment might, perhaps, have
been touched, when, as sometimes happened, the subject of a studio
composition was taken from the Bible, or the Apocrypha. Then,
possibly, would the young pagans of Larry's circle discover as much
acquaintance with the Scriptures as would point a jest, and give an
agreeable sensation of irreverence in discussing the details of the
subject.

"There," thought Larry, "no one thought about your religion. No one
cared if you had one, and the presumption was that you hadn't." But
here, in these little Irish towns, the question of a man's private
views on a matter that might be supposed to concern only h