d, and pulled up, the driver
saying, "There is the Father, yer honour!" In a moment up came a tall,
very fine-looking ecclesiastic, quite the best dressed and most
distinguished-looking priest I have yet seen in Ireland, with features
of a fine Teutonic type, and the erect bearing of a soldier. I jumped
down to greet him, and he proposed that we should walk together to his
house near by. An extremely good house I found it to be, well placed in
the most interesting quarter of the town. Having it in my mind to drive
on from Youghal to Lismore, there to make an early dinner, see the
castle of the Duke of Devonshire, and return to Cork by an evening
train, I had to decline Father Keller's cordial hospitalities, but he
gave me a most interesting hour with him in his comfortable study.
Father Keller stands firmly by the position which earned for him a
sentence of imprisonment last year, when he refused to testify before a
court of justice in a bankruptcy case, on the ground that it might
"drift him into answers which would disclose secrets he was bound in
honour not to disclose." He does not accept the view taken of his
conduct, however, by Lord Selborne, that, in the circumstances, his
refusal is to be regarded as the act of his ecclesiastical superiors
rather than his own. He maintains it as his own view of the sworn duty
of a priest, and not unnaturally therefore he looks upon his sentence as
a blow levelled at the clergy; nor, as I understood him, has he
abandoned his original contention, that the Court had no right to summon
him as a witness. It was impossible to listen to him on this subject,
and doubt his entire good faith, nor do I see that he ought to be held
responsible for the interpretation put by Mr. Lane, M.P., and others
upon his attitude as a priest, in a sense going to make him merely a
"martyr" of Home Rule. I did not gather from what he said that, in his
mind, the question of his relations with the Nationalists or the Plan of
Campaign entered into that affair at all, but simply that he believed
the right and the duty of a priest to protect, no matter at what cost to
himself, secrets confided to him as a priest, was really involved in his
consent or refusal to answer, when he was asked whether he was or was
not on a certain day at the "Mall House" in Youghal. Of course from the
connection of this refusal in this particular case with the Nationalist
movement, Nationalists would easily glide into the idea that h