Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/79

 64 stories:—The train was skelping away like mad along the main line to hell—for they have railways there now—till at last it pulled up at the junction. Whereupon the porters ran round shouting out, 'Catholics change here for purgatory: Protestants keep your places!'

This reminds us of Father O'Leary, a Cork priest of the end of the eighteenth century, celebrated as a controversialist and a wit. He was one day engaged in gentle controversy—or argufying religion as we call it in Ireland—with a Protestant friend, who plainly had the worst of the encounter. 'Well now Father O'Leary I want to ask what have you to say about purgatory?' 'Oh nothing,' replied the priest, 'except that you might go farther and fare worse.'

The same Father O'Leary once met in the streets a friend, a witty Protestant clergyman with whom he had many an encounter of wit and repartee. 'Ah Father O'Leary, have you heard the bad news?' 'No,' says Father O'Leary. 'Well, the bottom has fallen out of purgatory, and all the poor Papists have gone down into hell.' 'Oh the Lord save us,' answered Father O'Leary, 'what a crushing the poor Protestants must have got!'

Father O'Leary and Curran—the great orator and wit—sat side by side once at a dinner party, where Curran was charmed with his reverend friend. 'Ah Father O'Leary,' he exclaimed at last, 'I wish you had the key of heaven.' 'Well Curran it might be better for you that I had the key of the other place.'

A parish priest only recently dead, a well-known wit, sat beside a venerable Protestant clergyman at