A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly is uniformly excellent. Mr. Kiely's style is bawdy and hilarious. He writes with spacious confidence and, it is probably necessary to add, compassion. His priests—there seems to be one on every page—have earthly weaknesses. Most of his other men have a weakness for the ladies.

In "A Great God's Angel Standing", a priest takes Pascal Stakelum, "the notorious rural rake", with him on a visit to an asylum. Stakelum is mistaken for the priest and a patient insists on making a confession to him. But still he manages afterwards to meet behind a hedge a red-haired nurse who has "great blue eyes, looking up at him like headlamps seen through mist".

"The Green Lanes" features another rural rake whose doomed antics are recorded by a young man working the dispatch department of a religious magazine. There is a jolting...