Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/137

 that the penitents waiting outside overhear the words of priest or penitent, especially when one or other is a little deaf. At a church in Manchester one busy Saturday evening the priest interrupted his labours to inquire the object of a scuffle outside his box. As usual there was a quarrel about precedence amongst the mixed crowd that waited their turn at the door. A boy was complaining of being deprived of his legitimate place, and when the priest’s head appeared he appealed to him with the startling intelligence: ‘Please, father, I was next to the woman who stole the silk umbrella!’ And in my young days I remember that, on one occasion when we had been marched to church for confessing, we who were waiting our turn were startled to hear our stolid and venerable confessor audibly exclaim, repeating with horrified accent some statement of his youthful penitent, ‘Eighty-three times!’ We knew little about the seal in those days, and the boy himself did not grudge us the joke we had against him for many a day.

The penance which is inflicted usually consists of a few prayers. Corporal penances are now practically unknown, and even long and frequently repeated prayer is rarely imposed in England; in Ireland a prayer that will last half an hour, and will have to be repeated daily for months, is often imposed on the luckless Celts. I soon found the utter uselessness of imposing heavy penances from the number of people who accused themselves of having neglected their