as heretics, and never tried the hopeless task of converting them.
In his intercourse with them he dropped the subject of religion
altogether,--as a philologist or an entomologist will drop his
grammar or his insects in his intercourse with those to whom grammar
and insects are matters of indifference. And he was respected by
the Catholics of both sorts,--by those who did not and by those who
did adhere with strictness to the letter of their laws of religion.
With the former he did his duty, perhaps without much enthusiasm.
He preached to them, if they would come and listen to him. He
christened them, confessed them, and absolved them from their sins,-
-of course, after due penitence. But he lived with them, too, in a
friendly way, pronouncing no anathemas against them, because they
were not as attentive to their religious exercises as they might
have been. But with those who took a comfort in sacred things, who
liked to go to early masses in cold weather, to be punctual at
ceremonies, to say the rosary as surely as the evening came, who
knew and performed all the intricacies of fasting as ordered by the
bishop, down to the refinement of an egg more or less, in the whole
Lent, or the absence of butter from the day's cookery,--with these
he had all that enthusiasm which such people like to encounter in
their priest. We may say, therefore, that he was a wise man,--and
probably, on the whole, a good man; that he did good service in his
parish, and helped his people along in their lives not
inefficiently. He was a small man, with dark hair very closely cut,
with a tonsure that was visible but not more than visible; with a
black beard that was shaved every Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday
evenings, but which was very black indeed on the Tuesday and Friday
mornings. He always wore the black gown of his office, but would go
about his parish with an ordinary soft slouch hat,--thus subjecting
his appearance to an absence of ecclesiastical trimness which,