“Become a churchman?” and away, with a furious kick, again went the hassock.  “You should say, in simple English, make him a curate for the term of natural life.  The church in Ireland, Mary, is like the bar, it once was tenanted by gentlemen who had birth, worth, piety, learning, or all united to recommend him to promotion.  Now it is an arena where impure influence tilts against unblushing hypocrisy.  The race is between some shuffling old lawyer, or a canting saint.  One has reached the woolsack by political thimble-rigging, which means starting patriot, and turning, when the price is offered, a ministerial hack.  He forks a drunken dean, his son, into a Father-in-Godship with all the trifling temporalities attendant on the same.  Well, the other fellow is a ‘regular go-a-head,’ denounces popery, calculates the millennium, alarms thereby elderly women of both sexes, edifies old maids, who retire to their closets in the evening with the Bible in one hand, and a brandy-bottle in the other; and what he likes best, spiritualizes with the younger ones.”

“Stop, dear James.”  The emphasis on the word spiritualize had alarmed my mother, who, to tell the truth, had a slight touch of the prevailing malady, and, but for the counteracting influence of the commander, might have been deluded into saintship by degrees.

The great toe was, however, again awfully invaded, and my father’s spiritual state of mind not all improved by the second twinge, which was a heavy one.

“Why, d——­n it—­”

“Don’t curse, dear James.”

“Curse!  I will; for if you had the gout, you would swear like a trooper.”

“Indeed I would not.”

“Ah, Mary,” replied my father, “between twinges, if you knew the comfort of a curse or two—­it relieves one so.”

“That, indeed, James, must be but a sorry consolation, as Mr. Cantwell said—­”

“Oh! d——­n Cantwell,” roared my father, “a fellow that will tell you that there is but one path to heaven, and that he has discovered it.  Pish!  Mary, the grand route is open as the mail-coach road, and Papist and Protestant, Quaker and Anabaptist, may jog along at even pace.  I’m not altogether sure about Jews and Methodists.  One bearded vagabond at Portsmouth charged me, when I was going to the Peninsula, ten shillings a pound for exchanging bank notes for specie, and every guinea the circumcised scoundrel gave was a light one.  He’ll fry—­or has fried already—­and my poor bewildered old aunt, under the skillful management of the Methodist preachers, who for a dozen years in their rambles, had made her house an inn, left the three thousand five per cents, which I expected, to blow the gospel-trumpet, either in California or the Cape—­for, God knows, I never particularly inquired in which country the trumpeter was to sound ‘boot and saddle,’ after I had ascertained that the doting fool had made a legal testament quite sufficient for the purposes of the holy knaves who