Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/26

 proportionate to the sins. "I was too intimate with a neighbour's daughter, your Reverence." "Very bad," says the priest, making a stroke on his arm with the chalk. "There was a baby, your Reverence, and, to keep it dark, I made her throw it in the river." "Oh, you unfortunate miscreant," cried the priest, making two long strokes on his arm; "I'm afraid you'll never see purgatory. Anything else?" "Yes, your Reverence, God forgive me, there's something worse. The girl took to fretting; I was afraid she'd tell her people, and I shoved her into a bog-hole." "Away with you," cried the priest, starting to his feet in a rage. "I can't absolve a double murderer who has hid his crime from punishment." "But, your Reverence, wait a minute. I forgot to tell you she was a black Prisbiteran." "Pooh! pooh!" says the priest, brushing the score off his arm, "why did you make me dirty my coat?"

Mat Trumble, who was present, remarked that if the story was true, and doubtless it wasn't, the priest might have found a precedent in Anglo- Irish history, when the violation of a married woman, with which two Norman soldiers were charged in a court of Pale ended in a judgment that no offence was proved, as the victim was a mere Irishwoman!

The Presbyterian planters from whom my schoolfellows were descended preserved to an amazing degree the characteristics of their Scottish ancestors. They were thrifty, industrious, and parsimonious, and sometimes spoke a language worthy of Dumfriesshire. Their familiar sayings were of the same origin. "Keep the halter shank in your ain hand," was a Pawkie warning against rash confidence; or, "Don't let the want come at the web's end," an exhortation to foresight. The name employed to designate a courtesan was "an idle girl," a phrase which implies a population devoted to labour and duty. The few books which circulated among them were steeped in the bitterness of hereditary feuds. I remember being horror-struck by a copy of "Fox's Book of Martyrs," with illustrations fit to poison the spirit of a community for a century. Men reared for the liberal professions might in time outlive these prejudices, but with the poor and ignorant time only deepens them. But the nationalities sometimes mingled marvellously. I can recall more than