“That’s right, you bet,” one gray-haired man with a young face exclaimed, getting rid of a bulky chew of tobacco that had slightly impeded his utterance.  “There’s nothin’ like keepin’ up old institootions.”

By two o’clock fully one hundred people had gathered.

Thomas was radiant.  “Every wan is here now except that old Papist, O’Flynn,” he whispered to the drummer.  “I hope he’ll come, too, so I do.  It’ll be a bitter pill for him to swallow.”

The drummer did not share the wish.  He was thinking, uneasily, of the time two years ago—­the winter of the deep snow—­when he and his family had been quarantined with smallpox, and of how Father O’Flynn had come miles out of his way every week on his snowshoes to hand in a roll of newspapers he had gathered up, no one knows where, and a bag of candies for the little ones.  He was thinking of how welcome the priest’s little round face had been to them all those long, tedious six weeks, and how cheery his voice sounded as he shouted, “Are ye needin’ anything, Jimmy, avick?  All right, I’ll be back on Thursda’, God willin’.  Don’t be frettin’, now, man alive!  Everybody has to have the smallpox.  Sure, yer shaming the Catholics this year, Jimmy, keeping Lent so well.”  The drummer was decidedly uneasy.

There is an old saying about speaking of angels in which some people still believe.  Just at this moment Father O’Flynn came slowly over the hill.

Father O’Flynn was a typical little Irish priest, good-natured, witty, emotional.  Nearly every family north of the river had some cause for loving the little man.  He was a tireless walker, making the round of his parish every week, no matter what the weather.  He had a little house built for him the year before at the Forks of the Assiniboine, where he had planted a garden, set out plants and flowers, and made it a little bower of beauty; but he had lived in it only one summer, for an impecunious English couple, who needed a roof to cover them rather urgently, had taken possession of it during his absence, and the kind-hearted little father could not bring himself to ask them to vacate.  When his friends remonstrated with him, he turned the conversation by telling them of another and a better Man of whom it was written that He “had not where to lay His head.”

Father O’Flynn was greeted with delight, by the younger ones especially.  The seven little Breezes were very demonstrative, and Thomas Shouldice resolved to warn their father against the priest’s malign influence.  He recalled a sentence or two from “Maria Monk,” which said something like this:  “Give us a child until he is ten years old, and let us teach him our doctrine, and he’s ours for evermore.”

“Oh, they’re deep ones, them Jesuits!”

Father O’Flynn was just in time for the “walk.”

“Do you know what an Orange walk is, father?” one of the American women asked, really looking for information.