he could find hungry Papists
and convert them into well-fed Protestants by one and the same
process, he must be doing a double good, he argued;--could by no
possibility be doing an evil.

Such being the character of Mr. Townsend, it will not be thought
surprising that he should have his warm admirers and his hot
detractors. And they who were inclined to be among the latter were
not slow to add up certain little disagreeable eccentricities among
the list of his faults,--as young Fitzgerald had done in the matter
of the dirty surplices.

Mr. Townsend's most uncompromising foe for many years had been the
Rev. Bernard M'Carthy, the parish priest for the same parish of
Drumbarrow. Father Bernard, as he was called by his own flock, or
Father Barney, as the Protestants in derision were delighted to name
him, was much more a man of the world than his Protestant colleague.
He did not do half so many absurd things as did Mr. Townsend, and
professed to laugh at what he called the Protestant madness of the
rector. But he also had been an eager, I may also say, a malicious
antagonist. What he called the "souping" system of the Protestant
clergyman stank in his nostrils--that system by which, as he stated,
the most ignorant of men were to be induced to leave their faith by
the hope of soup, or other food. He was as firmly convinced of the
inward, heart-destroying iniquity of the parson as the parson was of
that of the priest. And so these two men had learned to hate each
other. And yet neither of them were bad men.

I do not wish it to be understood that this sort of feeling always
prevailed in Irish parishes between the priest and the parson even
before the days of the famine. I myself have met a priest at a
parson's table, and have known more than one parish in which the
Protestant and Roman Catholic clergymen lived together on amicable
terms. But such a feeling as that above represented was common,
and was by no means held as proof that the parties themselves
were quarrelsome or malicious. It was a part of their religious
convictions, and who dares to interfere with the religious
convictions of a clergyman?

On the day but one after that on which the Castle Richmond ladies
had been thrown from their car on the frosty road, Mr. Townsend and
Father Bernard were brought together in an amicable way, or in a way
that was intended to be amicable, for the first time in their lives.
The relief committee for the district in which the