Page:Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (Truslove & Bray).djvu/198

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NOTHER person who expressed a desire to see me was an Irish milkman. He had heard, what had seemed to be pretty generally reported, that I blamed none but the Irish priests. He put the question, whether it was a fact that I accused nobody but Father Phelan. I told him it was not so, and this pleased him so well, that he told me, if I would stay in Montreal, I should have milk for myself and child as long as I lived. It is well known that strong antipathies have long existed between French and Irish Catholics in that city.

The next day the poor Irishman returned, but in a very different state of mind. He was present at church in the morning, he said, when Father Phelan told the congregation that the nun of whom he had spoken before, had gone to court and accused him; and that he, by the power he possessed, had struck her powerless as she stood before the judge, so that she sunk helpless on the floor. He expressed, by the motion of his hands, the unresisting manner in which she had sunk under the mysterious influence, and declared that she would have died on the spot, but that he had chosen to keep her alive that she might retract her false accusation. This, he said she did, most humbly, before the court, acknowledging that she had been paid a hundred pounds as a bribe.

The first words of the poor milkman, on revisiting me, therefore, were like these: "That's to show you