"No, not that I know of."
"I don't like your story," I said. "I like the story about Julia
Cahill better."
"Well, they're both true; one's as true as the other; and Julia
and Margaret are in America. Once a woman is wake she must go to
America."
"It must have been a great shock to the priest."
"Faith it was, sir, to meet an unbaptised child on the roadside,
and the child the only bastard that was ever born in the parish,--
so Tom Mulhare says, and he's the oldest man in the county of
Mayo."
"It was altogether a very queer idea, this playhouse."
"It was indeed, sir, a queer idea; but you see he's a queer man.
He has been always thinking of something to do good; and it is
said that he thinks too much. Father James is a very queer man,
your honour."
At the end of a long silence, interrupted now and then by the
melancholy cry with which he encouraged his horse, he began
another story, how Father James MacTurnan had written to the Pope
asking that the priests might marry, "so afeard was he that the
Catholics were going to America and the country would become
Protestant. And there's James Murdoch's cabin, and he is the man
that got the five pounds that the bishop gave Father James to buy
a pig." And when I asked him how he knew all these things, he
said, "There isn't many days in the year that the old grey horse
and myself don't do five-and-twenty miles, and I'm often in and
out of Rathowen."
"There is no doubt," I said to myself, "that this car-driver is
the legitimate descendant of the ancient bards.
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