“Go to your confessional, Mike,” returned Joel, with a sneer—­“It’s a month, or more, sin’ you seen it, and the priest will think you have forgotten him, and go away offended.”

“Och!  It’s such a praist, as the likes of yees has no nade of throubling!  Yer conscience is aisy, Misther Straddle, so that yer belly is filled, and yer wages is paid.  Bad luck o sich religion!”

The allusion of Joel related to a practice of Michael’s that is deserving of notice.  It seems that the poor fellow, excluded by his insulated position from any communication with a priest of his own church, was in the habit of resorting to a particular rock in the forest, where he would kneel and acknowledge his sins, very much as he would have done had the rock been a confessional containing one authorized to grant him absolution.  Accident revealed the secret, and from that time Michael’s devotion was a standing jest among the dissenters of the valley.  The county Leitrim-man was certainly a little too much addicted to Santa Cruz, and he was accused of always visiting his romantic chapel after a debauch.  Of course, he was but little pleased with Joel’s remark on the present occasion; and being, like a modern newspaper, somewhat more vituperative than logical, he broke out as related.

“Jamie,” continued Joel, too much accustomed to Mike’s violence to heed it, “it does seem to me a hardship to be obliged to frequent a church of which a man’s conscience can’t approve.  Mr. Woods, though a native colonist, is an Old England parson, and he has so many popish ways about him, that I am under considerable concern of mind”—­ concern, of itself, was not sufficiently emphatic for one of Joel’s sensitive feelings—­“I am under considerable concern of mind about the children.  They sit under no other preaching; and, though Lyddy and I do all we can to gainsay the sermons, as soon as meetin’ is out, some of it will stick.  You may worry the best Christian into idolatry and unbelief, by parseverance and falsehood.  Now that things look so serious, too, in the colonies, we ought to be most careful.”

Jamie did not clearly understand the application of the present state of the colonies, nor had he quite made up his mind, touching the merits of the quarrel between parliament and the Americans.  As between the Stuarts and the House of Hanover, he was for the former, and that mainly because he thought them Scotch, and it was surely a good thing for a Scotchman to govern England; but, as between the Old countries and the New, he was rather inclined to think the rights of the first ought to predominate; there being something opposed to natural order, agreeably to his notions, in permitting the reverse of this doctrine to prevail.  As for presbyterianism, however, even in the mitigated form of New England church government, he deemed it to be so much better than episcopacy, that he would have taken up arms, old as he was, for