halfpenny, mistaking him for a beggar; and if not true, the story was
yet well invented. This young man had taken high honours in Dublin
University and had studied for the bar, where under the auspices of
his eminent kinsman he had excellent prospects; but his conscience
would not allow him to take a brief, lest he should be selling his
talents to defeat justice. With keen logical powers, he had warm
sympathies, solid judgment of character, thoughtful tenderness, and
total self-abandonment. He before long took Holy Orders, and became
an indefatigable curate in the mountains of Wicklow. Every evening
he sallied forth to teach in the cabins, and roving far and wide
over mountain and amid bogs, was seldom home before midnight. By such
exertions his strength was undermined, and he so suffered in his limbs
that not lameness only, but yet more serious results were feared. He
did not fast on purpose, but his long walks through wild country and
indigent people inflicted on him much severe deprivation: moreover,
as he ate whatever food offered itself,--food unpalatable and often
indigestible to him, his whole frame might have vied in emaciation
with a monk of La Trappe.

Such a phenomenon intensely excited the poor Romanists, who looked
on him as a genuine "saint" of the ancient breed. The stamp of heaven
seemed to them clear in a frame so wasted by austerity, so superior
to worldly pomp, and so partaking in all their indigence. That a dozen
such men would have done more to convert all Ireland to Protestantism,
than the whole apparatus of the Church Establishment, was ere long my
conviction; though I was at first offended by his apparent affectation
of a mean exterior. But I soon understood, that in no other way could
he gain equal access to the lower and lowest orders, and that he was
moved not by asceticism, nor by ostentation, but by a self-abandonment
fruitful of consequences. He had practically given up all reading